If you need to do this then start by figuring out why you need to do it, and adjust your approach too your threat model.

Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.

Turning on any sort of radio transmitter is just turning on a big flash light into the sky.

Turning on anything relatively uncommon is even worse: normal people have cellphones and use them. They don't use LoRa devices, there aren't a lot of LoRa devices and someone who only uses LoRa devices will stand out in any dataset.

> Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.

How many cameras did you just go by? did you have your cell phone on you? how many networks did it connect too? how many bluetooth broadcasts did it passively send out? Not being tracked and being in public are slowly becoming an untenable duo.

Most of the threats you've identified are enabled by carrying a location enabled radio device on you when you're out in public.

But it isn't illegal to wear a hat and sunglasseses, for example, and it is common to do so.

Yes!!! I've been wanting to make something like this for a long time. But unless the firmware is open source I wouldn't trust this for anything secure. But this looks like a dev kit so I can do whatever I want.

There are other alternatives https://meshtastic.org

It's mostly open source. https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore They have a couple minor things that are paid features.

Except that your texts go out to everyone on the mesh network.

Almost like ethernet, if only there were a way to fix that

MeshCore has verified public key sharing; see what happened to the other network at defcon. Direct messages are encrypted.

These look pretty fun, have you played with them much? What kind of range can you get?

I’ve tried them on snowmobile trails. With the vegetation the range was about a mile.

Range can be 100+ miles though if you can establish line of sight. Depending on the scenario, a high elevation repeater could give several mobile devices pretty significant range.

Range is line of sight. If you can see it, even if 100 miles away, odds are it'll work. Seattle area has one of the better networks for MeshCore. Tacoma to Vancouver BC is the range for semi reliable messaging

Don't the different frequency bands change that a lot? iirc these are all lower frequency so they can cut through foliage better than say 5ghz wi-fi

Yes you can get decent reception inside buildings. It operates in the 915mhz band. Similar frequencies to old school pagers. Lora is an interesting RF protocol, it has really good properties for operating below the noise floor.

Or just ham radio (not anonymous though)

And illegal to obscure/encrypt: http://www.arrl.org/part-97-text

It's a shame how neutered ham radio is.

not really. The prohibition on encryption/obfuscation is how you keep abusers off the frequencies.

If you run into someone who is regularly

- using encryption, obfuscation - failing to identify with a callsign - using lots of bandwidth - doing some sort of commercial activity.

then you get a group together, track them down, and report them to the FCC.

The thing people forget is that the primary goal of the ham system is to promote radio experience and experimentation. That is why there is such a wide variety of frequencies available.