We design and build the systems that keep people connected, aware of each other's location, and powered when normal infrastructure isn't an option — disaster response, remote fieldwork, search and rescue, overlanding, or a neighborhood that wants a radio network the internet can't take down. In practice that means two things: mesh radios that carry a message across miles with no towers, and ATAK, the map that shows a team where everyone is once that message arrives.

A quick primer, since the terms get thrown around a lot:

• Mesh network — devices ("nodes") relay messages for each other instead of depending on one tower or router. No single node has to reach the destination directly; the message hops node to node until it gets there.
• Node — any radio, phone, or computer taking part in the mesh.
• Hop / relay — one node passing a message on to the next. More hops means the mesh can cover far more ground than any one radio could alone.
• LoRa ("Long Range") — a low-power radio technology that trades bandwidth for range: often a mile or more between nodes, tens of miles with a good antenna and line of sight.
• Off-grid — works with no cell towers, no Wi-Fi router, no internet. That's the point of everything below.

The project most of our mesh work is built around. Meshtastic is free, open-source firmware for cheap LoRa radios (ESP32/nRF52 boards like the T-Beam, Heltec, or RAK) that turns them into mesh nodes out of the box — no license, no subscription, no cell signal required. Pair a node with your phone over Bluetooth and you get text messaging, GPS position sharing, and basic sensor telemetry across the whole mesh, with each node extending the range of every other node.

Use cases: group comms on a hike or hunt where there's no cell signal; keeping a convoy or work crew in contact off-road; a neighborhood or community mesh that still works when the power and cell towers go down; event and race-day coordination over a wide area; livestock or remote equipment monitoring on a property with no connectivity.

A newer, alternative LoRa mesh firmware, built around dedicated repeater and "room server" roles rather than every node doing everything. It aims for more efficient store-and-forward routing on the same class of cheap LoRa hardware Meshtastic runs on. We track it because the mesh radio space moves fast, and the right firmware depends on the network you're actually building — a handful of hikers versus a fixed, permanent repeater network are different problems.

Reticulum (RNS) is not a radio protocol — it's an encrypted networking stack that doesn't care what it's running over. The same Reticulum network can span LoRa, packet radio, Wi-Fi, plain internet, or a serial cable, automatically routing around whichever paths are actually up. It's the layer you build applications on top of when you need resilient, end-to-end encrypted comms and don't want to be locked into one radio.

• NomadNet — a distributed, forum-and-mail-style application built on Reticulum: nodes host pages, message boards, and file shares that anyone else on the network can browse, even with no internet behind it.
• MeshChat — a more familiar chat-app experience on top of Reticulum, with a web interface for messaging, voice calls, and file sharing between nodes.

Use cases: secure off-grid messaging that survives losing internet entirely; bridging mismatched hardware (a LoRa node talking to a laptop over Wi-Fi, talking to another site over the internet) into one resilient network; building a custom off-grid application without writing your own networking layer from scratch.

We keep a full walkthrough for standing up Reticulum, NomadNet, and MeshChat yourself in SETUP-GUIDE.md.

ATAK (Android Team Awareness Kit) is the other half of what we build. Where Meshtastic and Reticulum get a message across distance, ATAK is the shared map that message shows up on. Originally developed for the military and now released in a civilian version (CivTAK/ATAK-CIV), ATAK runs on a phone or tablet and gives a team a live, shared picture: everyone's position, markers for points of interest or hazards, drawn routes, chat, and file sharing — all overlaid on offline maps that work with zero connectivity.

The real power of ATAK shows up when it's paired with mesh radio: a Meshtastic node feeding position and message data into ATAK means a team knows where everyone is and can talk to each other with no cell network and no internet, anywhere the mesh reaches.

Use cases: search and rescue teams tracking who has covered what ground; wildland fire crews maintaining shared awareness of fire lines and personnel; event security and venue operations; off-grid group travel and overlanding where knowing everyone's position matters; any team-based field operation where "where is everyone, right now" is the actual problem being solved.

Two terms we use constantly, because we build the hardware behind them:

• EUD (End User Device) — the phone or tablet a person actually carries. We sell these pre-configured and ready to go: rugged Android hardware (Samsung Xcover, Google Pixel, rugged tablets) loaded with ATAK, Meshtastic, and the other field apps, so it's a working situational awareness terminal out of the box instead of a bare phone.
• DART (Decentralized Austere Radio Transceiver) — our own rugged LoRa radio. It's a purpose-built Meshtastic node in a sealed aluminum enclosure: 915MHz LoRa, GPS, Bluetooth, AES-256 encrypted channels, and preconfigured ATAK/Meshtastic integration, built to survive field conditions a hobbyist dev board wasn't designed for. Pair a DART with an EUD and a team has encrypted position and text comms with zero cell or internet dependency.

Our device-provisioning and rugged-radio-production repos are the tooling behind building and configuring these — DARTs and EUDs before they ship. The hardware itself is sold at nordicdevelopment.org.

Midwest Mesh Lab (source) is our open community hub for off-grid mesh networking, Raspberry Pi builds, and open hardware across the Midwest. It's where the region's Meshtastic and mesh-radio community trades builds, node maps, and troubleshooting notes — and it runs on a "no invented content" policy: nothing gets published there until it's real. We hold ourselves to the same standard here.

This is our GitHub org profile — the page you're reading is what shows up when someone visits github.com/NordicDevelopment-org. Alongside this README, it also holds SETUP-GUIDE.md, a complete, standalone walkthrough for building your own Reticulum / NomadNet / MeshChat setup on Windows, macOS, Linux, or a Raspberry Pi.

Mesh communications

ATAK & field devices

Off-grid power & hardware

Community & lab

Most of the above are private, working repos rather than public releases — we build them for our own use and for direct client work. There's also internal tooling and experiments not listed here. If you're working with us, you already have access to what you need.

Python · Meshtastic · Reticulum · LoRa · ATAK · Raspberry Pi · JavaScript · Docker

Questions about a project here, or want to talk mesh networking? Open an issue on the relevant repo, start at midwestmeshlab.net, or find our hardware at nordicdevelopment.org.