funker_nord · 12 min · ● live
Range test Rambynas → Memel confirmed. 41 km at RSSI −118, no repeater. Log attached.
zBRETT
From the Z-Netz to the radio net.
The board returns. A discussion forum from the German mailbox era, reborn over LoRa radio — threaded, asynchronous, no central infrastructure. A network that works without a network.
01
What it is, in three sentences
Not an emergency gadget, not a Twitter clone. An attempt to bring back a certain kind of conversation — structured, patient, to the point.
We're building a discussion forum that runs over radio instead of the internet. Small devices, about the size of a cigarette pack, pass posts from device to device — across a city, over kilometres, without cellular, without Wi-Fi, without a data centre.
Posts live on boards — sorted by topic, like the pinboards of the mailbox era. Every post knows which one it replies to. Out of 140-character snippets grows a readable discussion tree, not a chaotic comment thread.
02
What was there before — what's possible now
The mailbox era forced brevity through phone bills. LoRa forces it through physics. Two eras, the same principle.
1987 · The mailbox era
Brief, because time cost money
You dialled in by modem, downloaded the new posts, hung up and read offline in peace. The call cost by the minute — so you were brief. And because reading happened offline, you were thorough. The forums were called boards.
Today · LoRa radio
Long range, tiny payload
Licence-free, no contract, no cell tower. Several kilometres of range, a battery lasts years. The catch: incredibly slow, and legally capped at 1% airtime — about 700 messages per day per device. That's all.
03
The pager trick
A pager never transmitted a message — it just said “call back.” That's exactly what we do.
Only a tiny notice goes over radio: “New post in board X, here are the first 40 characters, and here is its address.” The full text lives elsewhere — retrievable the next time a device sees the internet. In five minutes. Or tomorrow.
That notice is always the same size — whether the post is two lines or twenty pages. Keep it to 140 characters and the whole post fits into the radio packet and is read everywhere, instantly.
The radio cost depends on how often something happens — not on how much is transmitted.
One beep costs the same — two lines or twenty pages behind it. Short post → everyone reads it. Long post → only those with internet. No rule, no moderation. It's simply so.
04
One discussion, three grades of hardness
The same structure — board, thread, reply — on the endnode's 1-bit display, on the web and in the app. The indent line is the same diagonal as the mark: across, down, across.
zbrett.de/brett/netz.funk
/netz.funk
relay_a3f · 8 min · ↳ relayed
Confirmed and forwarded to /region.nord.
store_hub · 3 min
Full replication complete, 3 hops.
Write a reply…
Send ↵
LIVE · beacon active, over radio
RELAYED · forwarded, over the line
STORED · held locally
05
Why it's a good idea
Not nostalgic tinkering. Four reasons.
1
It's not Twitter
Every post knows what it replies to. Out of 140-character snippets grows a readable tree — a conversation, not a stream. And with no room for full quotes, the thing that made old forums unreadable disappears.
2
It belongs to no one
No server to switch off, no company changing the rules, no algorithm. The devices belong to whoever put them on the roof. If one fails, the message finds another path.
3
It works when nothing works
Solar and battery. In a blackout, in a dead zone, on an overloaded network after a mass event, it keeps running. The side effect, not the purpose — but it's there.
4
It makes you think
When every post uses radio budget that someone else then doesn't have, you consider first whether you actually have something to say. The same mechanism that made the mailbox era good — this time on purpose.
06
What it is not
Honesty is part of it, otherwise it's advertising.
No replacement for a forum
If you have the internet, you have it better. This is something else, not a substitute.
Slow
A post takes minutes to reach your neighbour, hours to reach the other end of the city. Like 1991 — only today the law is to blame, not the modem.
Text only
No images, no video, no files. If you need that, you're in the wrong place.
A social catch
Whoever never has internet reads only the short posts. Two classes in the same discussion — whether that grates has to be shown by a real field test.
Get involved · Field test
Hardware with nRF52840 + SX1262 (EU868)? Help test zBRETT.
Become an endnode in a real city network. Qualifying devices, requirements and the how-to are on the hardware page.