🕸️OSNOWA

What it does

• Works with no outside infrastructure at all
• End-to-end encryption in the user’s device — relays hold no keys
• Interface with the TETRA network — SDS, statuses and LIP positions both ways
• Remote control of systems and telemetry over our own encrypted protocol
• An IP tunnel over LoRa
• Apps and drivers for Windows, Android, iOS and Linux
• Cheap off-the-shelf boards, a licence-free band

OSNOWA is a radio network meant to work when nothing else does: no internet, no cellular network, no satellite and no radio licence. It runs on LoRa modules in the 869 MHz band and deliberately puts range before speed — it carries short messages, statuses, positions and alarms through relays on high points, tens of kilometres per hop. The name comes from the Polish word for a geodetic control network: the set of reference points everything else is measured from.

What works on hardware

• A modem on Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 boards: it hides headers with the network key, authenticates every frame and retransmits, but never knows the content
• End-to-end encryption in the user’s device, checked in over two thousand trials
• Relaying through an intermediate node on three nodes
• A gateway to the TETRA network through the radio’s PEI connector — text and status to the radio, a message from the radio to the OSNOWA user with a delivery report; checked with a Motorola
• An IP tunnel over LoRa — ping with no loss
• Legal limits enforced in the device itself: an airtime budget and power converted to ERP
• A built-in measuring instrument for range and band-occupancy tests

System capabilities

• Interface with the TETRA network — SDS messages, statuses and LIP positions both ways
• Remote control of systems at distant sites over the radio network
• Telemetry over our own encrypted protocol
• Apps and drivers for Windows, Android, iOS and Linux

In progress

• Field range tests — after power and noise are measured with an analyzer
• Routing, message storage and group keys
• Network view on the ATAK map