Aoraton Chat
LoRa bridge for Meshtastic® radios A room that reaches past the internet.
Connect a Meshtastic radio to your browser over Bluetooth or USB, and an Aoraton room gets a second audience: what is typed in the room goes out over LoRa, and what the mesh says comes back in. The people on the radio side need no internet and no account — just the Meshtastic app they already use, or a radio with its own screen.
- Chrome, Edge or Firefox on a computer
- Chrome on Android (Bluetooth)
- A Meshtastic radio, by Bluetooth or USB
listening…
GEMA: Reached the hut. Storm after four, heading down early.
> Copy. Road to the village is clear, see you at six.
How it works
Three steps to the air.
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1
Connect your radio
Open the room’s LoRa panel, choose Bluetooth or USB, and pick your Meshtastic device from the browser’s list. Nothing to install on the radio.
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2
Read what the air means
The first time a room is bridged, it tells you exactly what a radio channel does and does not protect — and transmits nothing until you accept.
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3
The room is on the air
Messages go out on the mesh channel, and packets heard on the air arrive as ordinary messages, with the sending node named.
What you need
A radio, a browser, an open tab.
A Meshtastic radio
Any Meshtastic-compatible LoRa radio with Bluetooth or USB, on recent firmware.
Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Android
Chrome or Edge on a computer use Bluetooth or USB, Firefox uses USB, Chrome on Android uses Bluetooth. No browser on iPhone or iPad can do either. An iPhone can take part in the room and drive the bridge remotely — it just cannot hold the radio.
The tab stays open
A browser cannot hold the radio link in the background, so the device carrying the mesh is a machine you leave running. Over USB it reconnects by itself after a reload or a replug.
Any member’s radio can carry the room, and the room elects exactly one transmitter — so two connected devices never put the same message on the air twice.
Honest limits
Radio is small, slow and shared.
LoRa trades bandwidth for range. The app shows you that trade instead of hiding it.
233 bytes. Not characters.
One packet: Meshtastic does not split text across packets. Greek takes two bytes a letter and emoji take four, so the composer counts bytes — try it.
Too long for one packet: the mesh gets this shortened copy, marked with scissors, and the room still gets the whole message.
GEMA: is the sender’s short name, the default label on the air — paid for inside the same 233 bytes. Nothing is ever dropped in silence, which is what a radio does with an over-length packet.
A few messages a minute, at most
European 868 MHz radios may transmit for only 10% of each hour — six minutes. A full-length message spends about two seconds of that on the default preset, more on long-range presets, and every neighbour that repeats it spends shared airtime again. The app paces transmissions, reads the radio’s own airtime figure, and tells you when it is waiting rather than failing.
No delivery guarantee
Radio is radio: a packet can simply not arrive. Each message carries a mark showing whether it reached the air and whether a node confirmed it.
No files, calls or voice notes
Not on the mesh leg — they have no form a radio can carry. The room itself still has all of them.
More than text
The whole mesh, from the room.
A map of the mesh
The nodes the radio has heard, with signal quality, distance and bearing — and a node’s own privacy blur respected rather than rounded away.
Traceroute
Ask a node for the path back to it, hop by hop, in both directions, with the signal on each leg.
Sensor readings on demand
Ask a node with an environment sensor for temperature, humidity and pressure now, instead of waiting for its next scheduled report.
Alerts
An alert to every radio on the room’s channel. Radios set to alert on a bell ring, vibrate or flash — if they have a buzzer, vibration motor or LED fitted.
Locations, reactions, replies
Shared locations cross as waypoints, reactions as tapbacks, and replies stay threaded.
The assistant answers the mesh
A question asked from a radio reaches inco, and its reply is transmitted back — written short enough to be worth the airtime.
Read this first
Where end-to-end encryption ends.
Inside the room, messages are end-to-end encrypted. That guarantee ends at the radio.
In the room
End-to-end encryptedMessages are encrypted on your device, and the server only ever holds ciphertext. That includes text arriving off the mesh: it is encrypted with the room key before it reaches the database, so the room’s stored history is unaffected either way.
On the air
Shared channel keyMeshtastic encrypts a transmitted message with the channel’s key — AES-128 or AES-256, depending on the key. That is not end-to-end: anyone who holds the key can read it and, by default, send messages under another node’s name, and there is no forward secrecy. The default channel’s key is published, so treat that channel as public. A channel with no key, or a radio in licensed (ham) mode, sends in the clear.
A channel can reach the internet
A channel can be uplinked to MQTT — a setting on the radio, not on the room. It is uploaded decrypted unless the radio’s MQTT encryption is on, and the default public broker feeds public maps of the world’s nodes. The app reads the uplink flag off the radio and says so in the bridge panel.
Nothing goes out before you agree
The first time a room is bridged, it asks you to read and accept these limits before anything is transmitted. Use a private channel for anything you would not say out loud.
On the air
Your responsibility.
Radio is regulated, and the rules are local. You are responsible for operating your device on a band and at a power your country permits, for the duty-cycle limits that apply where you are, and for any licence your use may require. Aoraton Chat paces transmissions and refuses to send what the radio says it cannot, but it cannot know your local rules for you.
Do not rely on this for emergencies. It is a best-effort radio link over a shared band, not a safety service — if lives depend on the message, use the emergency services.
FAQ
Straight answers.
What is the LoRa bridge for Meshtastic radios?
It connects an Aoraton room to a Meshtastic LoRa mesh. One member connects a Meshtastic radio to their browser over Bluetooth or USB; from then on messages sent in the room are transmitted on the mesh channel, and packets heard on the air appear in the room as ordinary messages. People on the radio side need no internet and no account — a stock Meshtastic app, or a radio with its own screen, is enough.
What do I need to bridge a room to a Meshtastic mesh?
A Meshtastic-compatible LoRa radio on recent firmware, connected over Bluetooth or a USB cable: Chrome or Edge on a computer (Bluetooth or USB), Firefox on a computer (USB), or Chrome on Android (Bluetooth). No browser on iPhone or iPad can do either — an iPhone can still take part in the room, it just cannot be the device holding the radio. The tab holding the radio must stay open: a browser cannot keep the link in the background.
Are messages sent over LoRa end-to-end encrypted?
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Inside the room your messages stay end-to-end encrypted. On the mesh, Meshtastic encrypts them with the channel key — AES-128 or AES-256, depending on the key — so anyone who holds that key can read them and, by default, send messages under another node's name. The default channel's key is published, so treat that channel as public. Use a private channel for anything you would not say out loud, and remember that a channel uplinked to MQTT is forwarded to the internet.
How much can a LoRa message carry, and how fast?
233 bytes per packet — about 116 Greek characters or 233 plain Latin ones — and Meshtastic does not split text across packets. European 868 MHz radios may transmit for only 10% of each hour, which on the default preset allows a few full-length messages a minute at most, and fewer on long-range presets. Aoraton paces transmissions to stay inside that, shows a live byte counter while you type, and marks any message it had to shorten rather than dropping it silently.
What else can the bridge do besides messages?
Shared locations cross as Meshtastic waypoints, reactions as tapbacks, and replies as threaded replies. The room shows the mesh's nodes on a map with signal quality and distance, can ask a node to trace the path back to it, can ask a node with sensors for a temperature, humidity and pressure reading on demand, and can send an alert that makes radios set to alert on a bell ring or vibrate. Each message carries a mark showing whether it actually made it onto the air.
Put your room on the air.
Open a room, connect a radio, and whoever is in range can answer.
Open Aoraton ChatMeshtastic® is a registered trademark of Meshtastic LLC. Aoraton Chat is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Meshtastic project — see meshtastic.org for radios and firmware. Anything else: info@aoraton.com.