since 2025
LoRa Brescia
A video about sending messages without the internet turned into a group of nearly a thousand people building LoRa radio networks: guides, an evening at the club and lots of new repeaters.
On 18 March 2025, on Monte Ucia, I switched on the first LoRaA way of sending small amounts of data by radio, but very far and using very little battery. repeaterA radio placed up high that receives signals and sends them out again, so they travel further. in the province of Brescia. I didn’t think that cold, cloudy day would lead to anything more than a radio node at the top of a mast. Then I told the story in a video, and from that moment a community started to gather around the node.
18 March 2025, the first node.
How much the first node was meant to cover, on paper.
The video
In April 2025 I put a video on YouTube: “Messages without the internet: a revolution? LoRa and Meshtastic”. I wanted to explain in a simple way how a LoRa meshA network with no centre: every device receives messages and passes them on, so they reach places a single device couldn’t. network works: small devices passing messages to one another, even where the internet and the phone network don’t reach.
In a few days the video passed eighty thousand views; today it has more than a hundred and fifty thousand.
The group
Meanwhile the LoRa Brescia Telegram group grew: in May 2025 we were 497 people, today we are nine hundred. I run the group and the site myself.
The group has a website, lorabrescia.it, with guides: which boards are compatible, how to install the firmwareThe program that runs inside an electronic device and tells it what to do., how to configure a node and how to build a repeater. There are also pages on antennas, filters, sensors and frequencies, and one with the most frequent questions. The site looks beyond Brescia: it wants to be part of a national LoRa network, together with the LoRa Italia and MeshCoreAnother free program for LoRa mesh networks: only fixed repeaters pass messages on, which keeps the network lighter. Italia projects.
The networks we talk about are mostly two: MeshtasticA free, open project that turns small LoRa radios into a mesh network for sending messages and positions without the internet., which I already knew, and MeshCore, more recent. On Monte Ucia there are both today, and sometimes the second one hears better.
I also brought LoRa into the Brescia section of the ARI, the Italian radio amateurs’ association: on Tuesday 27 May 2025, at 9 pm, an evening about LoRa, with a talk titled “LoRa communications” explaining what LoRa is, how it works, the idea of a mesh, what nodes are, Meshtastic and MeshCore in Italy, and the other LoRa networks.
I have also talked about LoRa live on YouTube, on the QRP e Sentieri channel, together with other YouTubers and friends: Gabriele IU2RON of RG4Tech, Simone IW2LSO and Christian, the developer of Darkmesh. We did two or three live streams, and the first is the one that got the most views. You can watch them again: the first and the second.
The Meshtastic and MeshCore nodes on Monte Ucia, February 2026.
A map of the nodes
To see where the nodes are, I had built a map: anyone could mark their own, Meshtastic or MeshCore, by talking to a bot on Telegram. Then I handed it over to Ilario De Pascali, the founder of the MeshCore Italia group, who remade and modernised it for the MeshCore Italia group, adding live features: his map started from mine, but today it is almost entirely different. I switched it off on my own site: it would only have been one more map to keep up to date, while now there’s one that really is.
Repeaters built by other people
What pleased me most is that the network didn’t stay mine. In Bari, Vito IZ7JWW started by studying MeshCore and testing it at length, and a few weeks later he had already put up several repeaters at strategic points in the city. I have nothing to do with those nodes, and that’s exactly why they feel like proof that the group works.
What I learned
That explaining something can matter as much as building it: the node on Monte Ucia serves whoever passes near it with a radio, while a video and a guide serve people who would never have tried. And that an open network grows when other people put their own nodes into it.