Reticulum over AX.25 Packet Radio - My First Real-World Test with MeshChat and the Baofeng DM32

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:01]Hey guys, the Tech Prepper, hope you're all doing well. So, this is going to be a unedited video due to time, so very low production quality, but I do have something to say. I have been working on a proof of concept around something called Reticulum, and it is essentially a next-generation network stack for building networks that can be built off-grid. That is primarily my use case, as well as a network that offers end-to-end encryption from the core, and it has a lot of cool benefits.

[00:00:30]We're going to do a deep dive later, but a lot of the videos that I've seen online are pretty much using Reticulum only for Laura devices, and I just want to show you something I'm doing on my UHF business license with the next version of MCom tools, and it's pretty cool. So, let's go ahead and take a look at a quick demo. So, over here, I've got the AnyTone 578 manpack. It is sitting on a UHF business frequency because we are going to be doing encryption over Reticulum using the AX.25 interface, and this is something I hadn't seen too many people do. And then I'm using the Digirig light here. So, this is the next major version of MCom tools, and yes, it's going to have lots of encryption here. We're going to run ET mode, which will allow us to select our mode, and down at the bottom, I have two modes here. One is running Reticulum over NomadNet, but I actually really do prefer MeshChat. So, what is going to happen under the hood, it's going to ask us what type of transport or mode do we want to run? I'm using AX.25, and specifically, we're going to be using 1200 baud packet. 300 baud is going to be difficult for me to test because of FCC regulations, but under the hood, there's some magic happening that will allow me to use either 300 or 1200. So, if I did want to go ahead and swap this out with like the true SDX or one of my HF transceivers, all of this would work, but at a slower rate. So, right now we're going to use 1200 baud encrypted packet. It's going to start uh Dire Wolf. It's giving us a notice about make sure that you check your local laws and regulations. We'll hit yes.

[00:02:10]And it starts all of the services under the hood. You have to do nothing. And it starts up mesh chat here. And you can actually see here that this is an application that runs on top of the Reticulum network. If we take a look at my actual network, like the Nomad uh network not Nomad, but network visualizer, you can see here that we're running this Dell 5450.

[00:02:30]And we have a interface for packet radio connected here. Now, here's where the magic comes in. And again, I'm putting the cart in front of the horse, showing you the demo before we talk about what this is in a later video. I'm going to go ahead and open up a terminal.

[00:02:46]We're also going to run ET mode.

[00:02:49]And then again, I am running a BTech uh DM 32 over here again with the DigiRig. And it's sitting also on my UHF business frequency, since this is all going to be encrypted.

[00:03:01]And we're going to go select mesh chat.

[00:03:05]And we're also going to do this on the 1200 baud link.

[00:03:09]Start that up. It does a bunch of configuration and uh things behind the scenes to make it really nerd free and easy.

[00:03:17]It starts it up.

[00:03:18]And then what I'm going to do here really quickly is I'm going to announce myself as the Dell 7220. So, I'm going to go ahead and click uh announce.

[00:03:29]And we should see the radio key up here in just 1 second.

[00:03:37]Come on. Go ahead and key up.

[00:03:44]Don't know why it's taking so long.

[00:03:47]Uh maybe it just did. Let's go ahead and switch over to uh conversations.

[00:03:53]And this is the conversation I had before. You [snorts] can see the last one was, "Yep, let's show this off in a video." And the cool thing about this is that this interface is nice and modern, and I'm going to put um live demo from And I'll put uh Dell 72 20.

[00:04:16]And we're going to send this off right now.

[00:04:20]And you could see there that the radio just did key up. And if we head on over here, we should now see a couple things happening. We'll go back over to messages. We have one message there.

[00:04:32]And it's from the Dell 7220, and it says live demo from Dell 7220.

[00:04:41]And I'm just going to type in heck yeah.

[00:04:46]heck If I could type.

[00:04:51]exclamation point, and then again we're using the um 578. It just sent off that packet fully encrypted.

[00:05:00]And then if we go back over to this guy, we should see now that we have uh heck yeah over here.

[00:05:08]Why don't we have heck yeah over here?

[00:05:09]Oh, there it is. Heck yeah over here.

[00:05:12]So guys, the reason why I'm looking at this and why you might see a bunch of videos is that uh the internet has changed since I was uh a younger man in the '90s, actually an adolescent in the '90s, and between corporations and government just completely screwing the pooch on uh the internet, I want to have a way, if we ever need to, to build our own resilient off-grid end-to-end encrypted networks. Again, a lot of people are using LoRa, but LoRa is limited in its range. I am going to experiment with LoRa. I've got a couple devices coming that will also be a part of this network. Uh so, the cool thing is I can have interoperability between the lower devices as well as the UHF devices. And if stuff ever goes sideways, it won't really require any work for me to plug in an HF radio.

[00:05:59]And instead of picking 1,200 baud packet, pick 300 baud, and I could do long range, very long range. I'm talking 2-300 mi up to several thousands of miles without any intermediate infrastructure. So, my personal use for Reticulum is not to release my cell phone, not to connect it to the internet. I haven't really seen too many people do Actually, I haven't seen anybody do this. So, let me know if you guys are curious. Let me know if you want me to do a live stream on this. Let me know if you want me to do one-on-ones, but again, I'm not the expert. I'm brand new.

[00:06:29]All I'm trying to do is prepare for a scenario where we do need civilian-owned and operated secure networks unlike the internet that are free of prying eyes, where we're able to have anonymity.

[00:06:42]And again, we'll get into this when I do the video, but I'm only a few days into Reticulum, but I did want to be able to have a proof of concept where I did test that I was able to have it be what I'll call frictionless, really easy to use.

[00:06:56]And essentially, that is by making it be very nice and plug and play. I did experiment with something called Nomadnet, but it was a little bit too geeky for me. So, I had literally about 30 minutes ago, I finally just got the plug and play support with MCOM tools to support mesh chat. I know there's a new one called Mesh Chat X. I'm not an early adopter of tech. I prefer stability. I prefer version pinning. Anyways, big thanks. If you guys want to really support what I'm doing, please consider coming over and supporting me on buymeacoffee.com.

[00:07:29]I'm only able to do this with that support, and that support seems to be dropping off. I would really hate to have to shut down all of this research I'm doing. Again, I'm a realist. I don't like where the government is going with overreach and censorship. I don't like how corporations like Google will now have AI-generated results, then sponsored ads, and you just can't find anything on the internet. So, building networks like this, I think, is something we need to do to bring back freedom of speech and have content that the civilians are producing and not Big Tech. All right, guys, I'm The Tech Prepper. Be strong, be safe, and be prepared.