[vvanders]

Meshtastic(Lora) also doesn't require a license since it's in the ISM bands.

Lora also has really good FEC and other things that make it work incredibly well(at the cost of throughput). Honestly I wish we saw more things like that in the ham bands(other than FT8).

There's a couple Lora radios out there that are USB serial based and can be controlled with AT commands that would let you so something similar if you want to build up from scratch.

[sidewndr46]

This isn't true, it is not exclusive to the ISM bands. You can run it on any band you choose so long as you have a license to do so. Case in point: the ham bands

[vvanders]

Sure, that's "technically" correct but most usage of Lora is going to be in ISM since that's where they are traditionally deployed. That doesn't require a license which can be a hurdle if you don't already have one.

I've got a ham license so not a big deal for me but for those wanting to try radios without a huge investment a pair of $20 Lora AT serial radios are a great way to dip into digital radio.

[tzs]

Note that various ham bands have limitations on what types of emissions are allowed. For example some only allow RTTY and data, so no phone or image. And some allow phone or image but no data. Even if the type of information is allowed there might be technical restrictions prohibiting some forms of modulation.

So before using something that was designed depending on some non-ham part of the regulations for its legality, such as part 18 (ISM) in the US, on a ham band I'd want to look into the details and make sure it is not doing something under that part but not allowed under the ham regulations.

[sliken]

JS8call is pretty similar to FT8, but can do keyboard to keyboard chat. Not quite auto-mesh, but can store/forward through multiple other nodes.