How Far Can Reticulum Actually Go?
My last Reticulum video reached over 2 million people. And they all had the same follow-up question:
"Cool, but how far can it actually go?"
Fair.
Those first tests were between two nodes basically touching each other. So this time, we ran it for real — across a house, across a neighborhood, across a city, and ultimately from Florida to Venezuela. All over Reticulum. Here's what happened.
The Setup
Two types of network nodes, two Reticulum clients, and an escalating series of distance tests.
Base node: A green Haven node — Raspberry Pi running OpenMANET (a fork of OpenWRT). It has traditional Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and a sub-gigahertz 900 MHz HaLow chip with an external antenna. This is home base.
Mobile node: A Heltec HD-T01 — looks like an MCU but it's actually a full Linux board running OpenWRT. It has a HaLow radio, Ethernet jack, onboard 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, and SMA connector. Draws less than a watt. Way smaller footprint than the Raspberry Pi, which makes it perfect for on-the-go use.
Reticulum clients: MeshChat on desktop (connected to the Haven over 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi) and Sideband on Android (connected to the Heltec over either Ethernet or 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi). Neither the Haven nor the Heltec runs Reticulum directly — they just provide the mesh network. Reticulum runs on the client devices using auto interfaces.
That's an important distinction. The radios provide the link. Reticulum provides the protocol. It doesn't care what the link is.
Test 1: Across the House
The trivial test. Both nodes a room apart, connected over Wi-Fi HaLow at 1 MHz channel width.
Text messages — delivered instantly. Voice messages — delivered. Full-resolution photos — delivered. All over Reticulum, all over the HaLow mesh, all open source.
One interesting side note: you can plug the Heltec directly into an iPhone via USB-C to Ethernet. Turn off Wi-Fi, turn off cellular, turn off Bluetooth — the phone gets a network connection from the Heltec over Ethernet. I didn't even know smartphones supported that. You could run Reticulum on a phone with zero wireless connections, powered entirely by a mesh node plugged into the Lightning or USB-C port.
Probably not how most people would use it day-to-day, but it proves the architecture works at every layer.
Test 2: Across the Neighborhood
Same HaLow setup, but now I'm walking to the other side of the house and eventually driving around the neighborhood with the mobile node.
Result: Messages held to about 2,000 feet before dropping off.
Not amazing, but not surprising either. My house is cement brick — every house in this development is. Sub-gigahertz can penetrate dense material, but when you're permeating through enclosed concrete structures, you're fighting the physics.
To give the signal a better shot, I mounted a 9 dBi fiberglass omnidirectional antenna on the outside of the house using a tension mount on a windowsill — no drilling required. BNC connection on the antenna, BNC-to-SMA adapter to connect to the Haven node. About 20–30 feet off the ground.
Even with that upgrade, the neighborhood was tough. Dense cement houses acting as obstacles in every direction.
HaLow bandwidth note: At 1 MHz channel width, you're looking at about 1–2 Mbps real-world throughput. Capped at around 3 Mbps theoretical. That sounds modest, but I FaceTimed someone over it and the quality was perfectly fine. At 8 MHz channel width, HaLow can push up to 43 Mbps — real high-speed internet. For this test, we stayed at 1 MHz to optimize range over speed.
Test 3: Across the City
HaLow wasn't cutting it for distance. The kite test with a drone-mounted node spotted the home base intermittently — one-second connections with 10-second gaps — but never sustained enough to pass data.
So I pivoted to LoRa.
Reticulum doesn't care what radio you use. LoRa has properties that make it the king of range — it operates below the noise floor, teasing out data from patterns even when surrounded by noise. HaLow can't do that.
LoRa configuration (Heltec V4s, 27 dBm):
Bandwidth: 125 kHz
Spreading factor: 12 (maximum)
Coding rate: 8
Optimized entirely for range. We're just sending text messages, so throughput doesn't matter.
I set up one R-node on a tripod on a berm alongside a long straightaway with minimal obstructions. The other node was magnetized to the roof of my Tesla with a stub antenna. A script on the base node sent a Reticulum ping every 60 seconds.
Results:
|
Distance |
RSSI |
SNR |
Status |
|---|---|---|---|
|
0.5 miles |
-44 dBm |
5 dB |
Solid |
|
1 mile |
-85 dBm |
-3.2 dB |
Connected |
|
1.5 miles |
-92 dBm |
3.2 dB |
Connected |
|
2 miles |
-91 dBm |
4 dB |
Connected |
|
3.4 miles |
— |
-6.2 dB |
Connected (near limit) |
|
3.5 miles |
— |
— |
Dropped, reacquired at ~3 miles |
Three and a half miles over LoRa. No elevation to speak of. No exotic antenna setup. Just a tripod on a berm and a stub antenna on a car roof. Line of sight mattered more than altitude in this environment.
With better vantage points — a rooftop, a kite, a drone — you'd push that significantly further. LoRa links of 10+ miles with elevation are well-documented.
Test 4: Across the World
Here's where it gets interesting.
The math on a pure radio path: 2,500 miles from Florida to California, at 3.5 miles per hop, means you'd need about 800 nodes. Plus a space program and a small national budget.
But Reticulum is transport-agnostic. Wi-Fi, Ethernet, LoRa, tunnels — Reticulum treats them all as links. Even Morse code would theoretically work. If it can move ones and zeros, Reticulum can route it.
So instead of building 800 radio nodes across the continent, we connected two distant mesh networks with a tunnel.
The architecture:
Android phone running Sideband (Reticulum client) in Florida
→ LoRa R-node (circularly polarized antenna)
→ R-node connected to my desktop (another LoRa interface)
→ Desktop also has a TCP interface pointed at my Tailscale IP
→ Tailscale mesh VPN tunnel (encrypted)
→ Adolfo's computer in Venezuela, running MeshChat with a TCP interface listening on the Tailscale IP
The message leaves my phone over LoRa, hits my computer, tunnels through an encrypted mesh VPN, and lands on a terminal in Venezuela.
Result: It worked. First try.
The message went from Sideband on Android, over LoRa to my desktop, across an encrypted Tailscale tunnel, and appeared in MeshChat on Adolfo's screen in Venezuela. Fully encrypted end-to-end over Reticulum. The underlying infrastructure carried the packets but couldn't read them.
"But It Used the Internet"
Sort of. The packets traveled over existing internet infrastructure, but not the public internet in the way most services do. They moved inside a private encrypted mesh VPN — think of it as a really long encrypted Ethernet cable stretching across the world.
And if you don't want to rely on Tailscale specifically, you can do the same thing with fully open-source tools like WireGuard or Headscale, running the entire coordination layer yourself.
But here's the real point: those links don't have to be internet tunnels forever. Replace them with long-range radio, satellites, or thousands of community nodes, and the internet becomes optional.
Reticulum doesn't need the internet. Right now, it's convenient to use it. But the architecture is built so that the moment we have enough radio infrastructure, the tunnel disappears and the whole thing runs independently.
Why This Matters
Reticulum is the blockchain of communication. Nobody owns it. It's decentralized, community-run, unstoppable, and uncensorable.
Countries can pass legislation against it. They can't physically stop it.
The meshing algorithm doesn't do repeat flooding — it stores routes and scales linearly, not exponentially. That's the difference between a protocol that breaks at 10 nodes and one that could theoretically scale to something resembling the internet.
And it's encrypted by default. Everything is cryptographically complete. No opt-in privacy. No settings to toggle. It just works.
A free, decentralized mesh immune from state coercion is going to be pretty valuable in the coming years. And if we end up going the way a lot of other countries have, having another internet might not be optional.
What We Proved
House: Trivial. Text, voice, and images over HaLow. Works instantly.
Neighborhood: ~2,000 feet over HaLow through dense cement construction. Tough but functional.
City: 3.5 miles over LoRa with ground-level nodes and line of sight. No exotic setup.
International: Florida to Venezuela over LoRa + encrypted Tailscale tunnel. First try.
Reticulum doesn't need permission. It just needs a path.
So let's make a path.
Full Video
Getting Started
If you want to understand how all this fits together — the radios, the protocols, the mesh layers, the hardware decisions — the Parallel Primer walks you through the entire tech stack from silicon to signal.
For the full Haven build, including the node used as our base in these tests, grab the Haven Guide.
And if you want to follow along or run your own tests, join us in the Discord or on /r/ModernRadio.