How does this compare to CB radio in terms of the distance it can operate over?
The two radio boards seem a lot less capable but looks can be deceiving
given how ignorant I am over these matters.
CB/11meter range depends on many parameters, but even at 4W you would be lucky to reach beyond 80km.
The main difference is Lora Gateways receiver sensitivity is <-139dBm, and can recover data from what looks like the noise floor in most hardware.
If Lora had at least 3 manufacturers, I would have stuck it in every station years ago.
Cheers, =3
Also, the ERP limits on FCC stamped consumer modules is fairly low for unlicensed users. i.e. many Lora modules have iffy certified antennas for compliance reasons.
Cheers, =3
In general, the links supported range from line-of-sight to a few miles. If it can move 5 bits/second and you can make a link-layer abstraction (outputs the packet from 1 sender at a time) Reticulum will make the rest of the network work as intended.
Honestly LLMs might make for an interesting means of stenography. Encoding encrypted data in vectors that can be rendered to coherent statements and back.
CB can propagate (be bounced off of layers of the atmosphere) to get a significant distance, but it depends on atmospheric conditions, time of day, etc. So not reliable.
I've talked to Uruguay on my ham radio on 4 watts (HF, 10-meter band), but once again, I can't do that reliably/every day.
LoRA is 900mhz (in the US) so you don't get atmospheric propagation.. but with the right antenna (height is might!), you can get several miles in a city environment with only a watt or two... so forming a mesh is what allows you to achieve further distances.
It is not legal to encrypt CB or ham radio communications.