Looks like store and forward doesn’t work with these. Shame, I could actually put that to good use right away. Unless of course I didn’t get it set up correctly.

This is about on par with what I was thinking. If not a BBS, it could end up being a dongle for a computer. I was thinking they might make pretty good rnode endpoints, if they ever got firmware for it.

Chirp spread spectrum just describes how data is sent, it can’t really be proprietary. It would be like saying waving a flashlight to send morse code was proprietary. The black box part is you say “send this data” then that data comes out of the antenna in the Lora signal. The physical device that connects that data to a signal and visa-versa is what’s proprietary. There could be little tweaks to the transmission that make it work better, like having a slightly non-linear chirp, or some signal processing algorithm that can dig the signal out of some serious noise.

For the most part, a transmission isn’t proprietary, it’s how that transmission is made and how it’s processed that is. In the case of Lora, the radios are cheap and work incredibly well, so there isn’t much of a reason for someone to homebrew their own.