November 3, 2025
Grid gone, gossip stays
FreakWAN: A floor-routing WAN implementing a chat over bare-LoRa (no LoRaWAN)
Sicily’s off‑grid radio chat sparks sky‑bounce dreams and chip‑melt warnings
TLDR: FreakWAN is a DIY radio texting network aiming to cover Sicily without the internet, using simple long‑range radios and encryption. Commenters are hyped but split: some report city‑wide success, while others warn the chips can overheat and drift, sparking a debate between sky‑bounce fantasies and practical hop‑by‑hop relays.
FreakWAN wants to let you text without the internet—think walkie‑talkie DMs. It uses LoRa (a long‑range, low‑power radio) instead of phone towers and aims to blanket parts of Sicily with a DIY, off‑grid chat network that can even send tiny images. It’s open code, runs on cheap ESP32 boards, and includes group chats with encryption, message relays, and clever features like first‑hop delivery checks and storing messages locally. No LoRaWAN (the big‑company network); this is bare LoRa—punk‑rock radio texting.
Cue the comments: half the crowd is shouting “let’s go!”, half is waving a red flag. The spiciest warning comes from a Meshtastic veteran: heat the radio for even a moment and the chip’s clock can drift, wrecking transmissions. Translation: your off‑grid group chat might get spicy… and then go silent. On the dreamier side, one commenter wonders if we can bounce messages off the ionosphere like old‑school AM radio and text from 1,000 km away. Others clap back: power limits and laws say “nope,” so hop‑by‑hop relays are more realistic.
A tinkerer chimes in with street‑cred: “got two devices talking across town”—after antenna chaos—proving the idea isn’t just fantasy. Old‑timers drop receipts from 2023, while jokesters dub it “LoRagram” and joke about OLED burn‑in because even apocalypse chats need crisp pixels. The vibe: disaster‑ready hack meets ham‑radio daydream, with a dash of “will the hardware melt?” suspense.
Key Points
- •FreakWAN is a LoRa-based open WAN providing plaintext and encrypted distributed chat without internet or cellular networks.
- •The protocol uses broadcast routing, configurable retransmissions with random delays, and first-hop acknowledgments.
- •Security relies on AES in CBC mode with integrity detection and multiple keys, enabling virtual groups and collaborative relaying.
- •Implemented in MicroPython with no external dependencies; supports ESP32 devices including several LILYGO TTGO and T-WATCH models.
- •Installation requires specific MicroPython versions (1.22.2+ or 1.19.1), special handling for T3-S3’s 4MB flash, and flashing via esptool.py.