Part one and part two of this series covered how Reticulum and MeshCore actually move a sensor reading: LXMF’s delivery methods and Propagation Nodes on one side, a purpose-built sensor role and CayenneLPP encoding on the other. Both are genuinely decentralised, no shared infrastructure required beyond the nodes themselves. This closing part asks the question that decides whether that matters for a given deployment: what does the alternative, LoRaWAN, actually require to do the same job?

Part one of this series looked at sensor telemetry over Reticulum, and landed on a specific trade-off: Reticulum gives you cryptographic primitives (Destinations, Links, LXMF’s delivery methods) and leaves the shape of a telemetry deployment up to you. MeshCore takes the opposite approach. It has an actual sensor node role, a standard payload encoding, and a query model built around telemetry specifically, not general-purpose messaging repurposed for it.

LPWAN Meshes: Reticulum, Where I Landed covered Reticulum as a communications stack: transport-agnostic, cryptographically addressed, built for chat and file transfer over LoRa, packet radio, or whatever medium is available. This post is narrower on purpose: it breaks down the specific mechanics of moving a sensor reading, not a conversation, through Reticulum: which delivery method to pick, what a reading actually costs in packets and bits per second, and what already exists in the open-source community to build on rather than reinvent.

Starting 24 August, a popup village of builders, programmers, and ecological economists is settling into the Austrian mountains south of Vienna for a month. They are meeting in the Höllental, a valley of steep limestone cliffs and cold rivers, to run the Valley of the Commons: four consecutive weeks, each built around a different theme, commons economics, cosmo-local production, community living, governance and funding, tested against each other in the same physical place rather than argued about in the abstract.

If you have spent any time in the off-grid radio scene over the last few years, you know the frequency divisions. You either ran on the sub-GHz bands (915 MHz in Australia and the Americas, 868 MHz in Europe) for long-range, bush-penetrating reliability, or you accepted the high-congestion limits of local Wi-Fi. It was a trade-off we took for granted. If you wanted to send a message across 10 km of dense stringybark, you needed the long waves. If you wanted global hardware standardisation, you looked elsewhere.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve pulled apart four different LPWAN mesh technologies. Now it’s time to bring those findings together and look at which tool fits which job on the property or in the community.

There is no “perfect” protocol. What we have is a set of tools with different trade-offs. I’ve evaluated all four across five parameters to help cut through the marketing noise and get to the technical reality.

The ClusterDuck Protocol (CDP) was where my mesh networking journey truly began. The story behind Project OWL (Organisation, Whereabouts, and Logistics), students building emergency communication networks after Hurricane Maria, resonated deeply, highlighting a technology designed not for hobbyists or industry, but for saving lives when infrastructure fails. While I found its concepts “much better thought through” from the outset, the project’s slow pace and patchy hardware support meant my personal involvement never truly moved beyond some initial tinkering.

After years of experimenting with various LPWAN mesh networking technologies, I’ve settled on Reticulum as my primary LoRa mesh platform. It emerged as the clear frontrunner not because it’s simpler than the rudimentary Meshtastic (it isn’t), nor because it’s overtly more feature-rich than the structured MeshCore, but because its design philosophy fundamentally aligns with what matters most: privacy, resilience, and true decentralisation. It supports multiple bearer protocols, making it a powerful tool for building a future decentralised network.

While Meshtastic serves as a solid introduction to LPWAN mesh networking, MeshCore represents a move toward more structured networks, particularly when the limits of ad-hoc flooding become a bottleneck. It addresses the “airtime” congestion common in simpler protocols, offering a far more robust path for community-scale infrastructure where a “best effort” approach isn’t enough. MeshCore is built for managed deployments and regional sensor networks where reliability and structured routing are the priority.

For many new to LPWAN mesh networking, MeshTastic often appears as a starting point due to its affordability and active community. It can get you from zero to sending a basic mesh message relatively quickly. For some, it may seem like a convenient entry into mesh networking.

In this post, I’ll dive into what makes MeshTastic tick, where it excels, and where it falls short based on my own experience using it across various scenarios.

Long-range Sub-GHz wireless mesh networks have become essential for modern communication, particularly in remote areas where traditional infrastructure is impractical or impossible. By utilising lower frequencies (typically below 1 GHz), Sub-GHz networks can achieve remarkable range, low power consumption, and the ability to penetrate obstacles such as buildings and dense forests.

These characteristics make Sub-GHz mesh networks ideal for applications in IoT, outdoor communication, emergency response, and industrial networks. But with numerous technologies now available, choosing the right one for your needs can be challenging.