Amid all the conversation about Signal, and the debate over decentralization, one thing has often not been raised: all of these things require an Internet connection.
“Of course,” you might say. “Internet is everywhere these days.” Well, not so much, and it turns out there are some very good reasons that people might want messengers that work offline. Here are some examples:
- Internet-using messengers leak certain metadata (eg, that a person is using it, or perhaps a sophisticated adversary could use timing analysis to determine that two people are talking using it)
- Cell signal outages due to natural disaster, large influx of people (protests, unusual sporting events, festivals, etc), or other factors
- Locations where cell signals are not available (rural areas, camping locations, wilderness areas, etc.)
- Devices that don’t have cell data capability (many tablets, phones that have had service expire, etc.)
How do they work?
These all use some form of local radio signal. Some, such as Briar, may use short-range Bluetooth and Wifi, while others use radios such as LoRa that can reach several miles with low power. I’ve written quite a bit about LoRa before, and its unique low-speed but extreme-distance radio capabilities even on low power.
One common thread through these is that most of them are Android-only, though many are compatible with F-Droid and privacy-enhanced Android distributions.
Every item on this list uses full end-to-end encryption (E2EE).
Let’s dive on in.
Briar
Of all the options mentioned here, Briar is the one that bridges the traditional Internet-based approach with alternative options the best. It offers three ways for distributing data:
- Over the Internet, via Tor onion services
- Via Bluetooth to nearby devices
- Via Wifi, to other devices connected to the same access point, even if Internet isn’t wokring on that AP
As far as I can tell, there is no centralized server in Briar at all. Your “account”, such as it is, lives entirely within your device; if you wipe your device, you will have to make a new account and re-establish contacts. The use of Tor is also neat to see; it ensures that an adversary can’t tell, just from that, that you’re using Briar at all, though of course timing analysis may still be possible (and Bluetooth and Wifi uses may reval some of who is communicating).
Briar features several types of messages (detailed in the manual), which really are just different spins on communication, which they liken to metaphors people are familiar with:
- Basic 1-to-1 private messaging
- “Private groups”, in which one particular person invites people to the chat group, and can dissolve it at any time
- “Forums”, similar to private groups, but any existing member can invite more people to them, and they continue to exist until the last member leaves (founder isn’t special)
- “Blogs”, messages that are automatically shared with all your contacts
By default, Briar raises an audible notification for incoming messages of all types. This is configurable for each type.
“Blogs” have a way to reblog (even a built-in RSS reader to facilitate that), but framed a different way, they are broadcast messages. They could, for instance, be useful for a “send help” message to everyone (assuming that people haven’t all shut off notifications of blogs due to others using them different ways).
Briar’s how it works page has an illustration specifically of how blogs are distributed. I’m unclear on some of the details, and to what extent this applies to other kinds of messages, but one thing that you can notice from this is that a person A could write a broadcast message without Internet access, person B could receive it via Bluetooth or whatever, and then when person B gets Internet access again, the post could be distributed more widely. However, it doesn’t appear that Briar is really a full mesh, since only known contacts in the distribution path for the message would repeat it.
There are some downsides to Briar. One is that, since an account is fully localized to a device, one must have a separate account for each device. That can lead to contacts having to pick a specific device to send a message to. There is an online indicator, which may help, but it’s definitely not the kind of seamless experience you get from Internet-only messengers. Also, it doesn’t support migrating to a new phone, live voice/video calls, or attachments, but attachments are in the works.
All in all, a solid communicator, and is the only one on this list that works 100% with the hardware everyone already has. While Bluetooth and Wifi have far more limited range than the other entries, there is undeniably convenience in not needing any additional hardware, and it may be particularly helpful when extra bags/pockets aren’t available. Also, Briar is fully Open Source.
Meshtastic
Meshtastic is a radio-first LoRa mesh project. What do I mean by radio-first? Well, basically cell phones are how you interact with Meshtastic, but they are optional. The hardware costs about $30 and the batteries last about 8 days. Range between nodes is a few miles in typical conditions (up to 11km / 7mi in ideal conditions), but nodes act as repeaters, so it is quite conceivable to just drop a node “in the middle” if you and contacts will be far apart. The project estimates that around 2000 nodes are in operation, and the network is stronger the more nodes are around.
The getting started site describes how to build one.
Most Meshtastic device builds have a screen and some buttons. They can be used independently from the Android app to display received messages, distance and bearing to other devices (assuming both have a GPS enabled), etc. This video is an introduction showing it off, this one goes over the hardware buttons. So even if your phone is dead, you can at least know where your friends are. Incidentally, the phone links up to the radio board using Bluetooth, and can provide a location source if you didn’t include one in your build. There are ideas about solar power for Meshtastic devices, too.
Meshtastic doesn’t, as far as I know, have an option for routing communication over the Internet, but the devices appear to be very thoughtfully-engineered and easy enough to put together. This one is definitely on my list to try.
Ripple-based devices
This is based on the LoRa Mesh Radio Instructables project, and is similar in concept to Meshtastic. It uses similar hardware, a similar app, but also has an option with a QWERTY hardware keyboard available, for those that want completely phone-free operation while still being able to send messages.
There are a number of related projects posted at Instructables: a GPS tracker, some sensors, etc. These are variations on the same basic concept.
These use the Ripple firmware, which is not open source, so I haven’t pursued it further.
GoTenna
For people that want less of a DIY model, and don’t mind proprietary solutions, there are two I’ll mention. The first is GoTenna Mesh, which is LoRa-based and sells units for $90 each. However, there are significant community concerns about the longevity of the project, as GoTenna has re-focused on government and corporate work. The Android app hasn’t been updated in 6 monnths despite a number of reviews citing issues, and the iOS app is also crusty.
Beartooth
Even more expensive at $125 each is the Beartooth. Also a proprietary option, I haven’t looked into it more, but they are specifically targetting backwoods types of markets.
Do not use: Bridgefy
Bridgefy was briefly prominent since it was used during the Hong Kong protests. However, numerous vulnerabilities have been demonstrated, and the developers have said they are re-working the app to address them. I wouldn’t recommend it for now.
Alternatives: GMRS handhelds
In the USA, GMRS voice handhelds are widely available. Although a license is required, it is simple (no exam) and cheap ($35) and extends to a whole family. GMRS radios also interoperate with FRS radios, which require no license and share some frequencies, but are limited to lower power (though are often sufficient).
Handheld GMRS radios that use up to 5W of power are readily available. A voice signal is a lot harder to carry for a long distance than a very low-bandwidth digital one, so even with much more power you will probably not get the same kind of range you will with something like Meshtastic, and they don’t come with any kind of security or encryption at all. However, for basic communication, they are often a useful tool.
@jgoerzen honestly if it wasn’t for signal being my SMS app I wouldn’t be using it. The number of my contacts that use it is so low it would be hard to justify.
@jgoerzen @zeh I’m almost certain 50 MILLION people have never used secure telecommunications ever before last week.
@zeh @jgoerzen Saying that Signal is not more secure than SMS is ridiculous.
@jgoerzen IMO the biggest issue with Signal currently is the lack of a client for mobile Linux. There has been discussion of how to solve that on the Purism forum: https://forums.puri.sm/t/signal-silence-on-gnu-linux-a-comprehensive-summary-librem-5-app/5002
Signal / Silence on GNU+Linux : A comprehensive summary | Librem 5 app
@rd @jgoerzen When it comes to online privacy the Asian countries are basically one of the least developed regions. Here those who advocate tools to avoid centralized services are often regarded as just geeks. That is what I would like to change at first.
@ctonysem @jgoerzen I think there’s still a lot of that mentality elsewhere around the world. Exploring alternative options like decentralization (or even anything other than Facebook) still tends to make people ask, “what are you trying to hide,” or “how does that work for you down in your bunker?,” etc. Those are terrible reasons to just give up on the right to #privacy.
privacy
@rd @ctonysem @jgoerzen Can help to reach ppl where they ‘do care’:The big picture: Not only is our personal data being used “against us” (social media background checks, financial credit scores, even raising of health/car insurance rates (based on our data/outdoor hobbies).It’s also the building of deep psychological profiles, advertisers/political contractors manipulating our ability to make our own next decision/s. This is how I’ve reached ppl close to me.#privacy ☮️
privacy
@ademalsasa Hello, instance-neighbor! Thank you for the link; very interesting conversation.I used XMPP extensively for awhile, but haven’t now for a few years.Also, I learned of #Jami there. I hadn’t heard of Jami before, but sadly the website has no detail on how it achieves connections or if both endpoints must be online simultaneously for messages to be sent.
Jami
@AmarOk thank you & thank you very much, Amarok, for sharing about GNU #Jami. I’d like to add it is one of High Priority Projects of Free Software Foundation (@fsf) can be found here https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects.@jgoerzen #FreeSoftware #FSF
FSF
FreeSoftware
Jami
High Priority Free Software Projects — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software
@jgoerzen hello my new friend @danie10, glad to meet you. I saw you always share about #FreeSoftware that is good. Thanks!
FreeSoftware
@jgoerzen Great blog post. I was unaware of Mestastic. It’s something to explore.
@zehIt may be worth reiterating at this point that although Signal uses your phone number as a user identifier, I’m not actually sure of they store it or just a hash of it, and they definitely don’t transmit otjer numbers from your contacts for discovery:https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Does-Signal-send-my-number-to-my-contacts-They also announced they’re trying to move away from using phone numbers at all (the recent intoduction of PINs is in preparation of that) — but it may take some time@jgoerzen
Does Signal send my number to my contacts?
@kingannoyFor some colleagues whith whom I shared the ridento work, I simply rold them I’d rather use Signal than SMS or Whatsapp — I don’t have Whatsapp, and Signal is free and pretty much the same to use, except it’s not owned by Facebook. That worked for most — though some deleted Signal again when we were no longer driving together.I only brought up privacy when I had some time and thought they were willing to listen a bit.I found it harder to go the other way round.@jgoerzen
@kingannoy @jgoerzenAnother thing that can help:”Here’s my email, Threema ID, phone number/Signal ID — pick one! Also have an XMPP adress and Briar, butbtheycre a bit hard to use.”if the other person only has Whatsapp, it becomes harder for them to say no to installing a second messenger, and also harder to think the reason you’re not on Whatsapp is that you’re some hilbilly/conspiracy theorist who’s scared of technology, but actually know your way around messengers and such.
@jgoerzen @Erik Check our berty.tech. Doesn’t exist yet, but looks promising.
@AmarOk @ademalsasa Thank you. I hadn’t looked under the “blog” section, and the “questions” just went to a git repo, so I had discovered neither the docs site nor those posts. Very helpful!The similarities to #briar are many, though it looks like it trades the ability to do voice and video calls for anonymity (briar running over Tor hidden services; Jami using direct TCP/UDP connections between peers). I must say, I like the #Tor approach, but it may introduce unacceptable lag for video
Briar
Tor
@AmarOk Understood. One difference between your eval and briar is that briar uses Tor exclusively; that is, no exit node, since nodes find each other using onion addresses.Still, Jami looks very interesting and I’m checking it out later today. I think it would more easily have wide adoption than briar at this point. Thanks for your work on it!I love the decentralization, though leaking IPs to contacts makes me uncomfortable, as it often amounts to leaking coarse location.
@AmarOk Also I fairly frequently find wifi networks that permit outbound on only port 80 and 443, TCP. Can Jami work with those constraints?
@Mr_Teatime @jgoerzen @zeh #OWS keeps a copy of your phone number on record for account recovery purposes. Of course, this also opens you up to various attacks and compromises.
ows
@mathias @jgoerzen @zeh Is Wire no longer gratis? I didn’t pay anything for my Wire account. A couple months ago I got someone to start using it and I think they would have complained to me if it had a cost.
@resist1984 @jgoerzen @zeh I have been trying to look up all the alternatives mentioned. I am not excluding I might have looked at the “wrong one”, but this was the Wire I was thinking you guys were talking about: https://wire.com/en/
The most secure collaboration platform · Wire
@mathias @jgoerzen @zeh yeah that’s the one. Perhaps the “pricing” page is neglecting to mention that there is a gratis option. If you install the app you can probably create a gratis acct. You’ll have to give an email address but disposable addresses were accepted when I registered.
@resist1984 @jgoerzen @zeh I might give it a try later. Their FAQ seem to indicate that after the 30 day trial “The account will be deactivated and all history will be lost.”I was also thinking (but not finding) if it defaults to a free option after the trial, but none is mentioned.
@mathias @jgoerzen @zeh i think if they are only advertising the premium accounts, then that free trial is probably just for the premium packages. The gratis service is indefinite AFAIK.
@resist1984 @jgoerzen @zeh Ah. I went around it the other way. Due to how Apple Appstore works it is quite decent in finding out costs involved for apps. On that app page it says: “Wire offers a free version for external business partners or friends and family use.”
@jgoerzen Great thread. “Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.”It’s tough. I primarily use Matrix, and I’m impatient for decentralized IM to catch on. To watch a centralized option become popular instead can feel like a step backwards, since it feels like less attention/resources will go towards projects like Matrix if there’s less awareness, but it’s really a giant step forwards in normalizing encryption in the mainstream at all. I have to appreciate Signal for that massive accomplishment.
Not long ago, I posted a roundup of secure messengers with off-the-grid capabilities. Some conversation followed, which led me to consider some of the problems with P2P protocols.
P2P and Privacy
Brave adopting IPFS has driven a lot of buzz lately. IPFS is essentially a decentralized, distributed web. This concept has a lot of promise. But take a look at the IPFS privacy document. Some things to highlight:
“Nodes announce a variety of information essential to the DHT’s function — including their unique node identifiers (PeerIDs) and the CIDs of data that they’re providing — and because of this, information about which nodes are retrieving and/or reproviding which CIDs is publicly available.”
“those DHT queries happen in public. Because of this, it’s possible that third parties could be monitoring this traffic to determine what CIDs are being requested, when, and by whom.”
“nodes’ unique identifiers are themselves public…your PeerID is still a long-lived, unique identifier for your node. Keep in mind that it’s possible to do a DHT lookup on your PeerID and, particularly if your node is regularly running from the same location (like your home), find your IP address…Additionally, longer-term monitoring of the public IPFS network could yield information about what CIDs your node is requesting and/or reproviding and when.”
So in this case, you have traded giving information about what you request to specific sites to giving it to potentially hundreds of untrusted peers, some of which may be logging this for nefarious purposes. Worse, you have a durable PeerID that can be used for tracking and tied to your IP address — a data collector’s dream. This PeerID, combined with DHT requests and the CIDs (Content ID) of the things you host (implying you viewed them in the past), can be used to establish a picture of what you are requesting now and requested recently.
Similar can be said from everything like Scuttlebutt to GNU Jami; any service that operates on a P2P basis will likely reveal your IP, and tie your identity to it (and your IP address history). In some cases, as with Jami, this would be limited to friends you add; in others, as with Scuttlebutt and IPFS, it could be revealed to anyone.
The advantages of P2P are undeniable and profound, but few are effectively addressing the privacy implications. The one I know of that is, Briar, routes all traffic over Tor; every node is reached by a Tor onion service.
Federation: somewhat better
In a federated model, every client connects to a server, and there are many servers participating in a federation with each other. Matrix and Mastodon are examples of a federated model. In this scenario, only one server — your own homeserver — can track you by IP. End-to-end encryption is certainly possible in a federated model, and Matrix supports it. This does give a third party (the specific server you use) knowledge of your IP, but that knowledge can be significantly limited.
A downside of this approach is that if your particular homeserver is down, you are unable to communicate. Truly decentralized P2P solutions don’t have that problem — thought they do have a related one, which is that clients communicating with each other must both be online simultaneously in order for messages to be transmitted, and this can be a real challenge for mobile devices.
Centralization and Signal
Signal is centralized; it has one central server farm, and if it is down, you can’t communicate or choose any other server, either. We saw it go down recently after Elon Musk mentioned it.
Still, I recommend Signal for the general public. Here’s why.
Signal brings encryption and privacy to meet people where they’re at, not the other way around. People don’t have to choose a server, it can automatically recognize contacts that use Signal, it has emojis, attachments, secure voice and video calling, and (aside from the Musk incident), it all just works. It feels like, and is, a polished, modern experience with the bells and whistles people are used to.
I’m a huge fan of Matrix (aka Element) and even run my own instance. It has huge promise. But it is Not. There. Yet. Why do I saw this about Matrix?
Synapse, the only currently viable Matrix server, is not ready. My Matrix instance hosts ONE person, me. Synapse uses many GB of RAM and 10+GB of disk space. Despite extensive tuning, nothing helped much. It’s caused OOMs more than once. It can’t be hosted on a Raspberry Pi or even one of the cheaper VPSs.
Now then, how about choosing a Matrix instance? Well, you could just tell a person to use matrix.org. But then it spent a good portion of last year unable to federate with other popular nodes due to Synapse limitations. Or you could pick a random node, but will it be up when someone needs to say “my car broke down?” Some are run from a dorm computer, some by a team in a datacenter, some by one person with EC2, and you can’t really know. Will your homeserver be stable and long-lived? Hard to say.
Voice and video calling are not there yet in Matrix. Matrix has two incompatible video calling methods (Jitsi and built-in), neither work consistently well, both are hard to manage, and both have NAT challenges.
Matrix is so hard to set up on a server that there is matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. This makes it much better, but it is STILL terribly hard to deploy, and very simple things like “how do I delete a user” or “let me shrink down this 30GB database” are barely there yet, if at all.
Encryption isn’t mandatory in Matrix. E2EE has been getting dramatically better in the last few releases, but it is still optional, especially for what people would call “group chats” (rooms). Signal is ALWAYS encrypted. Always. (Unless, I guess, you set it as your SMS provider on Android). You’ve got to take the responsibility off the user to verify encryption status, and instead make it the one and only way to use the ecosystem.
Again, I love MAtrix. I use it every day to interact with Matrix, IRC, Slack, and Discord channels. It has a ton of promise. But would I count on it to carry a “my car’s broken down and I’m stranded” message? No.
How about some of the other options out there? I mentioned Briar above. It’s fantastic and its offline options are novel and promising. But in common usage, it can’t deliver a message unless both devices are online simultaneously, and doesn’t run on iOS (though both are being worked on). It also can’t send photos or do voice or video calling.
Some of these same limitations apply to most of the other Signal alternatives also. either that, or they are encryption-optional, or terribly hard to set up and use. I recently mentioned Status, which shows a ton of promise, but has no voice or video calling capabilities. Scuttlebutt is a fantastic protocol with extremely difficult onboarding (lengthy process, error-prone finding a pub, multi-GB initial download, etc.) And many of these leak IP addresses as discussed above.
So Signal gives people:
Dead-simple setup
Store-and-forward delivery (devices need not be online simultaneously)
Encrypted everything, including voice and video calls, and the ability to send photos and video encrypted
If you are going to tell someone, “it’s so EASY to get your texts away from Facebook and AT&T”, then Signal is the thing you’ve got to point them to. It may not be in two years, but for now, it is. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It advances the status quo without harming usability, which nothing else does yet.
I am aware of all of the very legitimate criticisms of Signal. They are real and they are why I am excited that there are so many alternatives with promise, some of which I use actively. Let us technical people use, debug, contribute to, and evangelize the alternatives.
And while we’re doing that, tell Grandma to contact us on Signal.
Must read for anybody interested in of grid mobile app communication. #Holochain community. changelog.complete.org/archives/10205…
Porting KA9Q NOS to Atari ST was the 2nd TCP/IP stack I worked on. I never got around to taking the exam to get my HAM license, though I had prepped for it twice. oh well.
It’s never too late!
Also if you’re interested, I wrote code to let you send IP packets — and even Ethernet frames — over an #XBee mesh github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet and also something similar for #LoRa github.com/jgoerzen/lorap…
Note: This post is also available on my webiste, where it will be periodically updated.
As I’ve been thinking and writing about privacy and decentralization lately, I had a conversation with a colleague this week, and he commented about how loss of privacy is related to loss of agency: that is, loss of our ability to make our own choices, pursue our own interests, and be master of our own attention.
In terms of telecommunications, we have never really been free, though in terms of Internet and its predecessors, there have been times where we had a lot more choice. Many are too young to remember this, and for others, that era is a distant memory.
The irony is that our present moment is one of enormous consolidation of power, and yet also one of a proliferation of technologies that let us wrest back some of that power. In this post, I hope to enlighten or remind us of some of the choices we have lost — and also talk about the ways in which we can choose to regain them, already, right now.
I will talk about the possibilities, the big dreams that are possible now, and then go into more detail about the solutions.
The Problems & Possibilities
The limitations of “online”
We make the assumption that we must be “online” to exchange data. This is reinforced by many “modern” protocols; Twitter clients, for instance, don’t tend to let you make posts by relaying them through disconnected devices.
What would it be like if you could fully participate in global communities without a constant Internet connection? If you could share photos with your friends, read the news, read your email, etc. even if you don’t have a connection at present? Even if the device you use to do that never has a connection, but can route messages via other devices that do?
Would it surprise you to learn that this was once the case? Back in the days of UUCP, much email and Usenet news — a global discussion forum that didn’t require an Internet connection — was relayed via occasional calls over phone lines. This technology remains with us, and has even improved.
Sadly, many modern protocols make no effort in this regard. Some email clients will let you compose messages offline to send when you get online later, but the assumption always is that you will be connected to an IP network again soon.
NNCP, on the other hand, lets you relay messages over TCP, a radio, a satellite, or a USB stick. Email and Usenet, since they were designed in an era where store-and-forward was valued, can actually still be used in an entirely “offline” fashion (without ever touching an IP-based network). All it takes is for someone to care to make it happen. You can even still do it over UUCP if you like.
The physical and data link layers
Many of us just accept that we communicate in a few ways: Wifi for short distances, and then cable modems or DSL for our local Internet connection, and then many people are fuzzy about what happens after that. Or, alternatively, we have 4G phones that are the local Internet connection, and the same “fuzzy” things happen after.
Think about this for a moment. Which of these do you control in any way? Sometimes just wifi, sometimes maybe you have choices of local Internet providers. After that, your traffic is handled by enormous infrastructure companies.
There is choice here.
People in ham radio have been communicating digitally over long distances without the support of the traditional Internet for decades, but the technology to do this is now more accessible to anyone. Long-distance radio has had tremendous innovation in the last decade; cheap radios can now communicate over several miles/km without any other infrastructure at all. We all carry around radios (Wifi and Bluetooth) in our pockets that don’t have to be used as mere access points to the Internet or as drivers of headphones, but can also form their own networks directly (Briar).
Meshtastic is an example; it’s an instant messenger that can form a mesh over many miles/km and requires no IP infrastructure at all. Briar is similar. XBee radios form a mesh in hardware, allowing peers to reach each other (also over many miles/km) with a serial or framed protocol.
Loss of peer-to-peer
Back in the late 90s, I worked at a university. I had a 386 on my desk for a workstation – not a powerful computer even then. But I put the boa webserver on it and could just serve pages on the Internet. I didn’t have to get permission. Didn’t have to pay a hosting provider. I could just DO it.
And of course that is because the university had no firewall and no NAT. Every PC at the university was a full participant on the Internet as much as the servers at Microsoft or DEC. All I needed was a DNS entry. I could run my own SMTP server if I wanted, run a web or Gopher server, and that was that.
There are many reasons why this changed. Nowadays most residential ISPs will block SMTP for their customers, and if they didn’t, others would; large email providers have decided not to federate with IPs in residential address spaces. Most people have difficulty even getting a static IP address in the first place. Many are behind firewalls, NATs, or both, meaning that incoming connections of any kind are problematic.
Do you see what that means? It has weakened the whole point of the Internet being a network of peers. While IP still acts that way, as a practical matter, there are clients that are prevented from being servers by administrative policy they have no control over.
Imagine if you, a person with an Internet connection to your laptop or phone, could just decide to host a website, or a forum on it. For moderate levels of load, they are certainly capable of this. The only thing in the way is the network management policies you can’t control.
Elaborate technologies exist to try to bridge this divide, and some, like Tor or cjdns, can work quite well. More on this below.
Expense of running something popular
Related to the loss of peer-to-peer infrastructure is the very high cost of hosting something popular. Do you want to share videos with lots of people? That almost certainly is going to require expensive equipment and bandwidth.
There is a reason that there are only a small handful of popular video streaming sites online. It requires a ton of money to host videos at scale.
What if it didn’t? What if you could achieve economies of scale so much that you, an individual, could compete with the likes of YouTube? You wouldn’t necessarily have to run ads to support the service. You wouldn’t have to have billions of dollars or billions of viewers just to make it work.
This technology exists right now. Of course many of you are aware of how Bittorrent leverages the swarm for files. But projects like IPFS, Dat, and Peertube have taken this many steps further to integrate it into a global ecosystem. And, at least in the case of Peertube, this is a thing that works right now in any browser already!
Application-level “walled gardens”
I was recently startled at how much excitement there was when Github introduced “dark mode”. Yes, Github now offers two colors on its interface. Already back in the 80s and 90s, many DOS programs had more options than that.
Git is a decentralized protocol, but Github has managed to make it centralized.
Email is a decentralized protocol — pick your own provider, and they all communicate — but Facebook and Twitter aren’t. You can’t just pick your provider for Facebook. It’s Facebook or nothing.
There is a profit motive in locking others out; these networks want to keep you using their platforms because their real customers are advertisers, and they want to keep showing you ads.
Is it possible to have a world where you get to pick your own app for sharing photos, and it works even if your parents use a different one? Yes, yes it is.
Mastodon and the Fediverse are fantastic examples for social media. Pixelfed is specifically designed for photos, Mastodon for short-form communication, there’s Pleroma for more long-form communication, and they all work together. You can use Mastodon to read Pleroma content or look at Pixelfed photos, and there are many (free) providers of each.
Freedom from manipulation
I recently wrote about the dangers of the attention economy, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here. Fundamentally, you are not the customer of Facebook or Google; advertisers are. They optimize their site to keep you on it as much as possible so that they can show you as many ads as possible which makes them as much money as possible. Ads, of course, are fundamentally seeking to manipulate your behavior (“buy this product”).
By lowering the cost of running services, we can give a huge boost to hobbyists and nonprofits that want to do so without an ultimate profit motive. For-profit companies benefit also, with a dramatically reduced cost structure that frees them to pursue their mission instead of so many ads.
Freedom from snooping (privacy and anonymity)
These days, it’s not just government snooping that people think about. It’s data stolen by malware, spies at corporations (whether human or algorithmic), and even things like basic privacy of one’s own security footage. Here the picture is improving; encryption in transit, at least at a basic level, has become much more common with TLS being a standard these days. Sadly, end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is not nearly as much, perhaps because corporations have a profit motive to have access to your plaintext and metadata.
Closely related to privacy is anonymity: that is, being able to do things in an anonymous fashion. The two are not necessarily equal: you could send an encrypted message but reveal who the correspondents are, as with email; or, you could send a plaintext message over a Tor exit node that hides who the correspondents are. It is sometimes difficult to achieve both.
Nevertheless, numerous answers exist here that tackle one or both problems, from the Signal messenger to Tor.
Solutions That Exist Today
Let’s dive in to some of the things that exist today.
One concept you’ll see in many of these is integrated encryption with public keys used for addressing. In other words, your public key is akin to an IP address (and in some cases, is literally your IP address.)
Data link and networking technologies (some including P2P)
Starting with the low-power and long-distance technologies, I’ve written quite a bit about LoRA, which are low-power long-distance radios. They can easily achieve several miles/km while still using much less than 1W of power. LoRA is a common building block of mesh off-the-grid messenger systems such as meshtastic, which forms an ad-hoc mesh of LoRA devices with days-long battery life and miles-long communication abilities. LoRA trades speed for bandwidth; in its longest-distance modes, it may operate at 300bps or less. That is not a typo. Some LoRAWAN devices have battery life measured in years (usually one-way sensors and such). Also, the Pine64 folks are working to integrate LoRA on nearly all their product line, which includes single-board computers, phones, and laptops.
Similar to LoRA is XBee SX from Digi. While not quite as long-distance as LoRA, it does still do quite a bit with low power and also goes many miles. XBee modules have automatic mesh routing in firmware, and can be used in either frame mode or “serial cable emulation” mode in which they act as if they’re a serial cable. Unlike plain LoRA, XBee radios do hardware retransmit. They also run faster, at up to about 150Kbps – though that is still a lot slower than wifi.
I’ve written about secure mesh messengers recently. One of them, Briar, particularly stands out in that it is able to form an ad-hoc mesh using phone’s Bluetooth radios. It can also route messages over the public Internet, which it does exclusively using Tor.
I’ve also written a lot about NNCP, the sort of modernized UUCP. NNCP is completely different than the others here in that it is a store-and-forward network – sort of a modern UUCP. NNCP has easy built-in support for routing packets using USB drives, clean serial interfaces, TCP, basically anything you can pipe to, even broadcast satellite and such. And you don’t even have to pick one; you can use all of the above: Internet when it’s available, USB sticks or portable hard drives when not, etc. It uses Tor-line onion routing with E2EE. You’re not going to run TCP over NNCP, but files (including videos), backups, email, even remote execution are all possible. It is the most “Unixy” of the modern delay-tolerant networks and makes an excellent choice for a number of use cases where store-and-forward and extreme flexibility in transportation make a lot of sense.
Moving now into the range of speeds and technologies we’re more used to, there is a lot of material out there on building mesh networks on Wifi or Wifi-adjacent technology. Amateur radio operators have been active in this area for years, and even if you aren’t a licensed ham and don’t necessarily flash amateur radio firmware onto your access points, a lot of the ideas and concepts they cover could be of interest. For instance, the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network covers both permanent and ad-hoc meshs, and this AREDN video covers device selection for AREDN — which also happens to be devices that would be useful for quite a few other mesh or long-distance point-to-point setups.
Once you have a physical link of some sort, cjdns and the Hyperboria network have the goals of literally replacing the Internet – but are fully functional immediately. cjdns assigns each node an IPv6 address based on its public key. The network uses DHT for routing between nodes. It can run directly atop Ethernet (and Wifi) as its own native protocol, without an IP stack underneath. It can also run as a layer atop the current Internet. And it can optionally be configured to let nodes find an exit node to reach the current public Internet, which they can do opportunistically if given permission. All traffic is E2EE. One can run an isolated network, or join the global Hyperboria network. The idea is that local meshes could be formed, and then geographically distant meshes can be linked together by simply using the current public Internet as a dumb transport. This, actually, strongly resembles the early days of Internet buildout under NSFNet. The Torento Mesh is a prominent user of cjdns, and they publish quite a bit of information online. cjdns as a standalone identity is in decline, but forms the basis of the pkt network, which is designed to foster an explosion in WISPs.
Similar in concept to cjdns is Yggdrasil, which uses a different routing algorithm. It is now more active than cjdns and has active participants and developers.
Althea is a startup in this space, hoping to encourage communities to build meshes whose purpose is to provide various routes to access to the traditional Internet, including digital currency micropayments. This story documents how one rural community is using it.
Tor is a somewhat interesting case. While it doesn’t provide kernel-level routing, it does provide a SOCKS5 proxy. Traditionally, Tor is used to achieve anonymity while browsing the public Internet via an exit node. However, you can stay entirely in-network by using onion services (basically ports that are open to Tor). All Tor traffic is onion-routed so that the originating IP cannot be discovered. Data within Tor is E2EE, though if you are using an exit node to the public Internet, that of course can’t apply there.
GNUnet is a large suite of tools for P2P communication. It includes file downloading, Tor-like IP over the network, a DNS replacement, and facilitates quite a few of the goals discussed here. (Added in a 2021-02-22 update)
P2P Infrastructure
While some of the technologies above, such as cjdns, explicitly facitilitate peer-to-peer communication, there are some other application-level technologies to look at.
IPFS has been having a lot of buzz lately, since the Brave browser integrated support. IPFS headlines as “powers the distributed web”, but it is actually more than that; various other apps layer atop it. The core idea is that content you request gets reshared by your node for some period of time, somewhat akin to Bittorrent. IPFS runs atop the regular Internet and is typically accessed through an app.
The Dat Protocol is somewhat similar in concept to IPFS, though the approach is somewhat different; it emphasizes efficient distribution of updates at the expense of requiring a git-like history.
IPFS itself is based on libp2p, which is designed to be a generic infrastructure for adding P2P capabilities to your own code. It is probably fair to say libp2p is still quite complex compared to ordinary TCP, and the language support is in its infancy, but nevertheless it is quite an exciting development to watch.
Of course almost all of us are familiar with Bittorrent, the software that first popularized the idea of a distributed mesh sharing knowledge about which chunks of a dataset they have in order to maximize the efficiency of distributing the whole thing. Bittorrent is still in wide use (and, despite its reputation, that wide use includes legitimate users such as archive.org and Debian).
I recently wrote about building a delay-tolerant offline-capable mesh with Syncthing. Syncthing, on its surface, is something like an open source Dropbox. But look into a bit and you realize it’s fully P2P, serverless, can support various network topologies including intermittent connectivity between network parts, and such. My article dives into that in more detail. If your needs are mostly related to files, Syncthing can make a fine mesh infrastructure that is auto-healing and is equally at home on the public Internet, a local wifi access point with no Internet at all, a private mesh like cjdns, etc.
Also showing some promise is Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB). Its most well-known application is a social network, but in my opinion some of the other applications atop SSB are more interesting. SSB is designed to be offline-friendly, can do things like automatically exchange data with peers on the same Wifi (eg, a coffee shop), etc., though it is an append-only log that can be unwieldy on mobile sometimes.
Instant Messengers and Chat
I won’t go into a lot of detail here since I recently wrote a roundup of secure mesh messengers and also a followup article about Signal and some hidden drawbacks of P2P. Please refer to those articles for some interesting things that are happening in this space.
Matrix is a distributed IM platform similar in concept to Slack or IRC, but globally distributed in a mesh. It supports optional E2EE.
Social Media
I wrote recently about how to join the Fediverse, which covered joining Mastodon, a federeated, decentralized social network. Mastodon is the largest of these, with several million users, and is something of a much nicer version of Twitter.
Mastodon is also part of what is known as the “Fediverse”, which are applications that are loosely joined together by their support of the ActivityPub protocol. Other popular Fediverse applications include Pixelfed (similar to Instagram) and Peertube for sharing video. Peertube is particularly interesting in that it supports Webtorrent for efficiently distributing popular videos. Webtorrent is akin to Bittorrent running efficiently inside your browser.
Concluding Remarks
Part of my goal with this is encouraging people to dream big, to ask questions like:
What could you do if offline were easy?
What is possible if you have freedom in the physical and data link layers? Dream big.
We’re so used to thinking that it’s quite difficult for two devices on the Internet to talk to each other. What would be possible if this were actually quite easy?
The assumption that costs rise dramatically as popularity increases is also baked into our thought processes. What if that weren’t the case — could you take on Youtube from your garage? Would lowering barriers to entry lower the ad economy and let nonprofits have more equal footing with large corporations?
We have so many walled gardens, from Github to Facebook, that we almost forget it doesn’t have to be that way.
So having asked these questions, my secondary point is to suggest that these aren’t pie-in-the-sky notions. These possibilites are with us right now.
You’ll notice from this list that virtually every one of these technologies is ad-free at its heart (though some would be capable of serving ads). They give you back your attention. Many preserve privacy, anonymity, or both. Many dramatically improve your freedom of association and communication. Technologies like IPFS and Bittorrent ease the burden of running something popular.
Some are quite easy to use (Mastodon or Peertube) while others are much more complex (libp2p or the lower-level mesh network systems).
Clearly there is still room for improvement in many areas.
But my fundamental point is this: good technology is here, right now. Technical people can vote with their feet and wallets and start using it. Early adopters will help guide the way for the next set of improvements. Join us!
@vfrmedia @sebastian @bob I’ll say in response to @vfrmedia that yes there are the types that dress up in reflective vests and play small-time cop, etc. But at least in my area, they are an annoying minority. More common are the true public service ones: people that run comms for bike rides, ultra marathons, tornado or other disaster response, etc. I’ve been involved in several of those and it was a lot of people with a good heart wanting to put their hobby to a good use.
@vfrmedia @sebastian @bob A number of hams view general public service comms as good practice for disaster response comms, if that’s ever needed. I’m definitely not a prepper but this stuff has been needed here in tornado alley. I’ve done comms in an actual disaster response once (went to Joplin, MO after the tornado there) and indeed running nets and such locally was good preparation for doing so in more challenging circumstances.
@jgoerzen @vfrmedia @bob Interesting different perspective… The running comms for events aspect is not something that happens around here. Most of the mountainbike races I’ve been to just rented a PMR system and put the repeater on top of a mountain. Or they asked the local fire brigade or the THW (German Federal Agency for Technical Relief) for help, they have the gear anyway and are usually happy for any excuse to practise using it. Or they just cellphones if the coverage ist good enough.
@jgoerzen @vfrmedia @bob Maybe things are just structured differently here. I guess many folks are who are interested in disaster response and emergency comms wind up volunteering for the THW or their local fire brigade. So the emergency comms ham radio bubble contains many of those prepper types that would feel at home in those other organisations.
@sebastian @jgoerzen @bob in UK, RAYNET sometimes does the same stuff at cycle races and other sports events (often working closely alongside St Johns Ambulance)I think one big difference in Germany is the existence of the THW (which other countries don’t have, although I think its a very good idea to have such an organisation)https://www.east-suffolk-raynet.co.uk/diary-of-events-for-2022/
Most of us carry cell phones with us almost everywhere we go. So much so that we often forget not just the usefulness, but even the joy, of having our own radios. For instance:
When traveling to national parks or other wilderness areas, family and friends can keep in touch even where there is no cell coverage.
It is a lot faster to just push a button and start talking than it is to unlock a phone, open the phone app, select a person, wait for the call to connect, wait for the other person to answer, etc. “I’m heading back.” “OK.” Boom, 5 seconds, done. A phone user wouldn’t have even dialed in that time.
A whole group of people can be on the same channel.
You can often buy a radio for less than the monthly cost of a cell plan.
From my own experience, as a person and a family that enjoys visiting wilderness areas, having radio communication is great. I have also heard from others that they’re also very useful on cruise ships (I’ve never been on one so I can’t attest to that).
There is also a sheer satisfaction in not needing anybody else’s infrastructure, not paying any sort of monthly fee, and setting up the radios ourselves.
How these services fit in
This article is primarily about handheld radios that can be used by anybody. I laid out some of their advantages above. Before continuing, I should point out some of the other services you may consider:
Cell phones, obviously. Due to the impressive infrastructure you pay for each month (many towers in high locations), in areas of cell coverage, you have this ability to connect to so many other phones around the world. With radios like discussed here, your range will likely a few miles.
Amateur Radio has often been a decade or more ahead of what you see in these easy personal radio devices. You can unquestionably get amateur radio devices with many more features and better performance. However, generally speaking, each person that transmits on an amateur radio band must be licensed. Getting an amateur radio license isn’t difficult, but it does involve passing a test and some time studying for the exam. So it isn’t something you can count on random friends or family members being able to do. That said, I have resources on Getting Started With Amateur Radio and it’s not as hard as you might think! There are also a lot of reasons to use amateur radio if you want to go down that path.
Satellite messengers such as the Garmin Inreach or Zoleo can send SMS-like messages across anywhere in the globe with a clear view of the sky. They also often have SOS features. While these are useful safety equipment, it can take many minutes for a message to be sent and received – it’s not like an interactive SMS conversation – and there are places where local radios will have better signal. Notably, satellite messengers are almost useless indoors and can have trouble in areas without a clear view of the sky, such as dense forests, valleys, etc.
My earlier Roundup of secure messengers with off-the-grid capabilities (distributed/mesh messengers) highlighted a number of other options as well, for text-only communication. For instance:
For very short-range service, Briar can form a mesh over Bluetooth from cell phones – or over Tor, if Internet access is available.
Dedicated short message services Mesh Networks like Meshtastic or Beartooth have no voice capability, but share GPS locations and short text messages over their own local mesh. Generally they need to pair to a cell phone (even if that phone has no cell service) for most functionality.
Yggdrasil can do something similar over ad-hoc Wifi, but it is a lower-level protocol and you’d need some sort of messaging to run atop it.
This article is primarily about the USA, though these concepts, if not the specific implementation, apply many other areas as well.
The landscape of easy personal radios
The oldest personal radio service in the US is Citizens Band (CB). Because it uses a lower frequency band than others, handheld radios are larger, heavier, and less efficient. It is mostly used in vehicles or other installations where size isn’t an issue.
The FRS/GMRS services mostly share a set of frequencies. The Family Radio Service is unlicensed (you don’t have to get a license to use it) and radios are plentiful and cheap. When you get a “blister pack” or little radios for maybe $50 for a pair or less, they’re probably FRS. FRS was expanded by the FCC in 2017, and now most FRS channels can run up to 2 watts of power (with channels 8-14 still limited to 0.5W). FRS radios are pretty much always handheld.
GMRS runs on mostly the same frequencies as FRS. GMRS lets you run up to 5W on some channels, up to 50W on others, and operate repeaters. GMRS also permits limited occasional digital data bursts; three manufacturers currently use this to exchange GPS data or text messages. To use GMRS, you must purchase a GMRS license; it costs $35 for a person and their immediate family and is good for 10 years. No exam is required. GMRS radios can transmit on FRS frequencies using the GMRS authorization.
The extra power of GMRS gets you extra distance. While only the best handheld GMRS radios can put out 5W of power, some mobile (car) or home radios can put out the full 50W, and use more capable exterior antennas too.
There is also the MURS band, which offers very few channels and also very few devices. It is not in wide use, probably for good reason.
Finally, some radios use some other unlicensed bands. The Motorola DTR and DLR series I will talk about operate in the 900MHz ISM band. Regulations there limit them to a maximum power of 1W, but as you will see, due to some other optimizations, their range is often quite similar to a 5W GMRS handheld.
All of these radios share something in common: your radio can either transmit, or receive, but not both simultaneously. They all have a PTT (push-to-talk) button that you push and hold while you are transmitting, and at all other times, they act as receivers.
You’ll learn that “doubling” is a thing – where 2 or more people attempt to transmit at the same time. To listeners, the result is often garbled. To the transmitters, they may not even be aware they did it – since, after all, they were transmitting. Usually it will be clear pretty quickly as people don’t get responses or responses say it was garbled. Only the digital Motorola DLR/DTR series detects and prevents this situation.
FRS and GMRS radios
As mentioned, the FRS/GMRS radios are generally the most popular, and quite inexpensive. Those that can emit 2W will have pretty decent range; 5W even better (assuming a decent antenna), though the 5W ones will require a GMRS license. For the most part, there isn’t much that differentiates one FRS radio from another, or (with a few more exceptions) one GMRS handheld from another. Do not believe the manufacturers claims of “50 mile range” or whatever; more on range below.
FRS and GMRS radios use FM. GMRS radios are permitted to use a wider bandwidth than FRS radios, but in general, FRS and GMRS users can communicate with each other from any brand of radio to any other brand of radio, assuming they are using basic voice services.
Some FRS and GMRS radios can receive the NOAA weather radio. That’s nice for wilderness use. Nicer ones can monitor it for alert tones, even when you’re tuned to a different channel. The very nicest on this – as far as I know, only the Garmin Rino series – will receive and process SAME codes to only trigger alerts for your specific location.
GMRS (but not FRS) also permits 1-second digital data bursts at periodic intervals. There are now three radio series that take advantage of this: the Garmin Rino, the Motorola T800, and BTech GMRS-PRO. Garmin’s radios are among the priciest of GMRS handhelds out there; the top-of-the-line Rino will set you back $650. The cheapest is $350, but does not contain a replaceable battery, which should be an instant rejection of a device like this. So, for $550, you can get the middle-of-the-road Rino. It features a sophisticated GPS system with Garmin trail maps and such, plus a 5W GMRS radio with GPS data sharing and a very limited (13-character) text messaging system. It does have a Bluetooth link to a cell phone, which can provide a link to trail maps and the like, and limited functionality for the radio. The Rino is also large and heavy (due to its large map-capable screen). Many consider it to be somewhat dated technology; for instance, other ways to have offline maps now exist (such as my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro, which has those maps on a watch!). It is bulky enough to likely be left at home in many situations.
The Motorola T800 doesn’t have much to talk about compared to the other two.
Both of those platforms are a number of years old. The newest entrant in this space, from budget radio maker Baofeng, is the BTech GMRS-PRO, which came out just a couple of weeks ago. Its screen, though lacking built-in maps, does still have a GPS digital link similar to Garmin’s, and can show you a heading and distance to other GMRS-PRO users. It too is a 5W unit, and has a ton of advanced features that are rare in GMRS: ability to pair a Bluetooth headset to it directly (though the Garmin Rino supports Bluetooth, it doesn’t support this), ability to use the phone app as a speaker/mic for the radio, longer text messages than the Garmin Rino, etc. The GMRS-PRO sold out within a few days of its announcement, and I am presently waiting for mine to arrive to review. At $140 and with a more modern radio implementation, for people that don’t need the trail maps and the like, it makes a compelling alternative to Garmin for outdoor use.
Garmin documents when GPS beacons are sent out: generally, when you begin a transmission, or when another radio asks for your position. I couldn’t find similar documentation from Motorola or BTech, but I believe FCC regulations mean that the picture would be similar with them. In other words, none of these devices is continuously, automatically, transmitting position updates. However, you can request a position update from another radio.
It should be noted that, while voice communication is compatible across FRS/GMRS, data communication is not. Garmin, Motorola, and BTech all have different data protocols that are incompatible with radios from other manufacturers.
FRS/GMRS radios often advertise “privacy codes.” These do nothing to protect your privacy; see more under the privacy section below.
Motorola DLR and DTR series
Although they can be used for similar purposes, and I do, these radios are unique from the others in this article in several ways:
Their sales and marketing is targeted at businesses rather than consumers
They use digital encoding of audio, rather than analog FM or AM
They use FHSS (Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum) rather than a set frequency
They operate on the 900MHz ISM band, rather than a 460MHz UHF band (or a lower band yet for MURS and CB)
The DLR series is quite small, smaller than many GMRS radios.
I don’t have space to go into a lot of radio theory in this article, but I’ll briefly expand on some of this.
First, FHSS. A FHSS radio hops from frequency to frequency many times per second, following some preset hopping algorithm that is part of the radio. Although it complicates the radio design, it has some advantages; it tends to allow more users to share a band, and if one particular frequency has a conflict with something else, it will be for a brief fraction of a second and may not even be noticeable.
Digital encoding generally increases the quality of the audio, and keeps the quality high even in degraded signal conditions where analog radios would experience static or a quieter voice. However, you also lose that sort of audible feedback that your signal is getting weak. When you get too far away, the digital signal “drops off a cliff”. Often, either you have a crystal-clear signal or you have no signal at all.
Motorola’s radios leverage these features to build a unique radio. Not only can you talk to a group, but you can select a particular person to talk to with a private conversation, and so forth. DTR radios can send text messages to each other (but only preset canned ones, not arbitrary ones). “Channels” are more like configurations; they can include various arbitrary groupings of radios. Deconfliction with other users is established via “hopsets” rather than frequencies; that is, the algorithm that it uses to hop from frequency to frequency. There is a 4-digit PIN in the DLR radios, and newer DTR radios, that makes privacy very easy to set up and maintain.
As far as I am aware, no scanner can monitor DLR/DTR signals. Though they technically aren’t encrypted, cracking a DLR/DTR conversation would require cracking Motorola’s firmware, and the chances of this happening in your geographical proximity seem vanishingly small.
I will write more below on comparing the range of these to GMRS radios, but in a nutshell, it compares well, despite the fact that the 900MHz band restrictions allow Motorola only 1W of power output with these radios.
There are three current lines of Motorola DLR/DTR radios:
The Motorola DLR1020 and DLR1060 radios. These have no screen; the 1020 has two “channels” (configurations) while the 1060 supports 6. They are small and compact and great pocketable “just work” radios.
The Motorola DTR600 and DTR700 radios. These are larger, with a larger antenna (that should theoretically provide greater range) and have a small color screen. They support more channels and more features (eg, short messages, etc).
The Motorola Curve (aka DLR110). Compared to the DLR1060, it adds limited WiFi capabilities that are primarily useful in certain business environments. See this thread for more. These features are unlikely to be useful in the environments we’re talking about here.
These radios are fairly expensive new, but DLRs can be readily found at around $60 on eBay. (DTRs for about $250) They are quite rugged. Be aware when purchasing that some radios sold on eBay may not include a correct battery and charger. (Not necessarily a problem; Motorola batteries are easy to find online, and as with any used battery, the life of a used one may not be great.) For more advanced configuration, the Motorola CPS cable works with both radios (plugs into the charging cradle) and is used with the programming software to configure them in more detail.
The older Motorola DTR650, DTR550, and older radios are compatible with the newer DLR and DTR series, if you program the newer ones carefully. The older ones don’t support PINs and have a less friendly way of providing privacy, but they do work also. However, for most, I think the newer ones will be friendlier; but if you find a deal on the older ones, hey, why not?
This thread on the MyGMRS forums has tons of useful information on the DLR/DTR radios. Check it out for a lot more detail.
One interesting feature of these radios is that they are aware if there are conflicting users on the channel, and even if anybody is hearing your transmission. If your transmission is not being heard by at least one radio, you will get an audible (and visual, on the DTR) indication that your transmission failed.
One thing that pleasantly surprised me is just how tiny the Motorola DLR is. The whole thing with antenna is like a small candy bar, and thinner. My phone is slightly taller, much wider, and only a little thinner than the Motorola DLR. Seriously, it’s more pocketable than most smartphones. The DTR is of a size more commonly associated with radios, though still on the smaller side. Some of the most low-power FRS radios might get down to that size, but to get equivolent range, you need a 5W GMRS unit, which will be much bulkier.
Being targeted at business users, the DLR/DTR don’t include NOAA weather radio or GPS.
Power
These radios tend to be powered by:
NiMH rechargable battery packs
AA/AAA batteries
Lithium Ion batteries
Most of the cheap FRS/GMRS radios have a NiMH rechargable battery pack and a terrible charge controller that will tend to overcharge, and thus prematurely destroy, the NiMH packs. This has long ago happened in my GMRS radios, and now I use Eneloop NiMH AAs in them (charged separately by a proper charger).
The BTech, Garmin, and Motorola DLR/DTR radios all use Li-Ion batteries. These have the advantage of being more efficient batteries, though you can’t necessarily just swap in AAs in a pinch. Pay attention to your charging options; if you are backpacking, for instance, you may want something that can charge from solar-powered USB or battery banks. The Motorola DLR/DTR radios need to sit in a charging cradle, but the cradle is powered by a Micro USB cable. The BTech GMRS-PRO is charged via USB-C. I don’t know about the Garmin Rino or others.
Garmin offers an optional AA battery pack for the Rino. BTech doesn’t (yet) for the GMRS-PRO, but they do for some other models, and have stated accessories for the GMRS-PRO are coming. I don’t have information about the T800. This is not an option for the DLR/DTR.
Meshtastic
I’ll briefly mention Meshtastic. It uses a low-power LoRa system. It can’t handle voice transmissions; only data. On its own, it can transmit and receive automatic GPS updates from other Meshtastic devices, which you can view on its small screen. It forms a mesh, so each node can relay messages for others. It is also the only unit in this roundup that uses true encryption, and its battery lasts about a week – more than the “a solid day” you can expect out of the best of the others here.
When paired with a cell phone, Meshtastic can also send and receive short text messages.
Meshtastic uses much less power than even the cheapest of the FRS radios discussed here. It can still achieve respectable range because it uses LoRa, which can trade bandwidth for power or range. It can take it a second or two to transmit a 50-character text message. Still, the GMRS or Motorola radios discussed here will have more than double the point-to-point range of a Meshtastic device. And, if you intend to take advantage of the text messaging features, keep in mind that you must now take two electronic devices with you and maintain a charge for them both.
Privacy
The privacy picture on these is interesting.
Cell phone privacy
Cell phones are difficult for individuals to eavesdrop, but a sophisticated adversary probably could: or an unsophisticated adversary with any manner of malware. Privacy on modern smartphones is a huge area of trouble, and it is safe to say that data brokers and many apps probably know at least your location and contact list, if not also the content of your messages. Though end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal can certainly help. See Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances for more details.
GMRS privacy
GMRS radios are unencrypted and public. Anyone in range with another GMRS radio, or a scanner, can listen to your conversations – even if you have a privacy code set. The privacy code does not actually protect your privacy; rather, it keeps your radio from playing conversations from others using the same channel, for your convenience.
However, note the “in range” limitation. An eavesdropper would generally need to be within a few miles of you.
Motorola DLR/DTR privacy
As touched on above, while these also aren’t encrypted, as far as I am aware, no tools exist to eavesdrop on DLR/DTR conversations. Change the PIN away from the default 0000, ideally to something that doesn’t end in 0 (to pick a different hopset) and you have pretty decent privacy right there.
“Decent” doesn’t mean perfect; it is certainly possible that sophisticated adversaries or state agencies could decode DLR/DTR traffic, since it is unencrypted. As a practical matter, though, the lack of consumer equipment that can decode this makes it be, as I say, “pretty decent”.
Meshtastic
Meshtastic uses strong AES encryption. But as messaging features require a paired phone, the privacy implications of a phone also apply here.
Range
I tested my best 5W GMRS radios, as well as a Motorola DTR600 talking to a DLR1060. (I also tried two DLR1060s talking to each other; there was no change in rnage.) I took a radio with me in the car, and had another sitting on my table indoors. Those of you familiar with radios will probably recognize that being in a car and being indoors both attenuate (reduce the strength of) the signal significantly. I drove around in a part of Kansas with gentle rolling hills.
Both the GMRS and the DLR/DTR had a range of about 2-3 miles. There were times when each was able to pull out a signal when the other was not. The DLR/DTR series was significantly better while the vehicle was in motion. In weaker signal conditions, the GMRS radios were susceptible to significant “picket fencing” (static caused by variation in the signal strength when passing things like trees), to the point of being inaudible or losing the signal entirely. The DLR/DTR remained perfectly clear there. I was able to find some spots where, while parked, the GMRS radios had a weak but audible signal but the DLR/DTR had none. However, in all those cases, the distance to GMRS dropping out as well was small. Basically, no radios penetrate the ground, and the valleys were a problem for them all.
Differences may play out in other ways in other environments as well: for instance, dense urban environments, heavy woods, indoor buildings, etc.
GMRS radios can be used with repeaters, or have a rooftop antenna mounted on a car, both of which could significantly extend range – and both of which are rare.
The DLR/DTR series are said to be exceptionally good at indoor environments; Motorola rates them for penetrating 20 floors, for instance. Reports on MyGMRS forums state that they are able to cover an entire cruise ship, while the metal and concrete in them poses a big problem for GMRS radios. Different outdoor landscapes may favor one or the other also.
Some of the cheapest FRS radios max out at about 0.5W or even less. This is probably only a little better than yelling distance in many cases. A lot of manufacturers obscure transmit power and use outlandish claims of range instead; don’t believe those. Find the power output. A 2W FRS transmitter will be more credible range-wise, and the 5W GMRS transmitter as I tested better yet. Note that even GMRS radios are restricted to 0.5W on channels 8-14.
The Motorola DLR/DTR radio gets about the same range with 1W as a GMRS radio does with 5W. The lower power output allows the DLR to be much smaller and lighter than a 5W GMRS radio for similar performance.
Overall conclusions
Of course, what you use may depend on your needs. I’d generally say:
For basic use, the high quality, good range, reasonable used price, and very small size of the Motorola DLR would make it a good all-arounder. Give one to each person (or kid) for use at the mall or amusement park, take them with you to concerts and festivals, etc.
Between vehicles, the Motorola DLR/DTR have a clear range advantage over the GMRS radios for vehicles in motion, though the GPS features of the more advanced GMRS radios may be more useful here.
For wilderness hiking and the like, GMRS radios that have GPS, maps, and NOAA weather radio reception may prove compelling and worth the extra bulk. More flexible power options may also be useful.
Low-end FRS radios can be found very cheap; around $20-$30 new for the lowest end, though their low power output and questionable charging circuits may limit their utility where it really counts.
If you just can’t move away from cell phones, try the Zoleo app, which can provide some radio-like features.
A satellite communicator is still good backup safety gear for the wilderness.
Postscript: A final plug for amateur radio
My 10-year-old Kenwood TH-D71A already had features none of these others have. For instance, its support for APRS and ability to act as a digipeater for APRS means that TH-D71As can form an automatic mesh between them, each one repeating new GPS positions or text messages to the others. Traditional APRS doesn’t perform well in weak signal situations; however, more modern digital systems like D-Star and DMR also support APRS over more modern codecs and provide all sorts of other advantages as well (though not FHSS).
My conclusions above assume a person is not going to go the amateur radio route for whatever reason. If you can get those in your group to get their license – the technician is all you need – a whole world of excellent options opens to you.
Appendix: The Trisquare eXRS
Prior to 2012, a small company named Trisquare made a FHSS radio they called the eXRS that operated on the 900MHz band like Motorola’s DLR/DTR does. Trisquare aimed at consumers and their radios were cheaper than the Motorola DLR/DTR. However, that is where the similarities end.
Trisquare had an analog voice transmission, even though it used FHSS. Also, there is a problem that can arise with FHSS systems: synchronization. The receiver must hop frequencies in exactly the same order at exactly the same time as the sender. Motorola has clearly done a lot of engineering around this, and I have never encountered a synchronization problem in my DLR/DTR testing, not even once. eXRS, on the other hand, had frequent synchronization problems, which manifested themselves in weak signal conditions and sometimes with doubling. When it would happen, everyone would have to be quiet for a minute or two to give all the radios a chance to timeout and reset to the start of the hop sequence. In addition, the eXRS hardware wasn’t great, and was susceptible to hardware failure.
There are some that still view eXRS as a legendary device and hoard them. You can still find them used on eBay. When eXRS came out in 2007, it was indeed nice technology for the day, ahead of its time in some ways. I used and loved the eXRS radios back then; powerful GMRS wasn’t all that common. But compared to today’s technology, eXRS has inferior range to both GMRS and Motorola DLR/DTR (from my recollection, about a third to half of what I get with today’s GMRS and DLR/DTR), is prone to finicky synchronization issues when signals are weak, and isn’t made very robustly. I therefore don’t recommend the eBay eXRS units.
Don’t assume that the eXRS weaknesses extend to Motorola DLR/DTR. The DLR/DTR radios are done well and don’t suffer from the same problems.
Note: This article has a long-term home on my website, where it may be updated from time to time.
Meshtastic is really developing into something huge now, in recent months it has seen parabolic growth, if you want to learn more about Meshtastic checkout https://meshabout.com