One of the truly valuable aspects of Reticulum is the ability to use it over almost any conceivable kind of communications medium. The interface types available for configuration in Reticulum are flexible enough to cover the use of most wired and wireless communications hardware available, from decades-old packet radio modems to modern millimeter-wave backhaul systems.

If you already have or operate some kind of communications hardware, there is a very good chance that it will work with Reticulum out of the box. In case it does not, it is possible to provide the necessary glue with very little effort using for example the PipeInterface or the TCPClientInterface in combination with code like TCP KISS Server (https://github.com/simplyequipped/tcpkissserver) by simplyequipped (https://github.com/simplyequipped).

It is also very easy to write and load custom interface modules into Reticulum, allowing you to communicate with more or less anything you can think of.

While this broad support and flexibility is very useful, an abundance of options can sometimes make it difficult to know where to begin, especially when you are starting from scratch.

This chapter will outline a few different sensible starting paths to get real-world functional wireless communications up and running with minimal cost and effort. Two fundamental devices categories will be covered, RNodes and WiFi-based radios. Additionally, other common options will be briefly described.

Knowing how to employ just a few different types of hardware will make it possible to build a wide range of useful networks with little effort.

It is useful to combine different link and hardware types when designing and building a network. One useful design pattern is to employ high-capacity point-to-point links based on WiFi or millimeter-wave radios (with high-gain directional antennas) for the network backbone, and using LoRa-based RNodes for covering large areas with connectivity for client devices.

Reliable and general-purpose long-range digital radio transceiver systems are commonly either very expensive, difficult to set up and operate, hard to source, power-hungry, or all of the above at the same time. In an attempt to alleviate this situation, the transceiver system RNode was designed. It is important to note that RNode is not one specific device, from one particular vendor, but an open plaform that anyone can use to build interoperable digital transceivers suited to their needs and particular situations.

An RNode is a general purpose, interoperable, low-power and long-range, reliable, open and flexible radio communications device. Depending on its components, it can operate on many different frequency bands, and use many different modulation schemes, but most commonly, and for the purposes of this chapter, we will limit the discussion to RNodes using LoRa modulation in common ISM bands.

Avoid Confusion! RNodes can use LoRa as a physical-layer modulation, but it does not use, and has nothing to do with the LoRaWAN protocol and standard, commonly used for centrally controlled IoT devices. RNodes use raw LoRa modulation, without any additional protocol overhead. All high-level protocol functionality is handled directly by Reticulum.

RNode has been designed as a system that is easy to replicate across time and space. You can put together a functioning transceiver using commonly available components, and a few open source software tools. While you can design and build RNodes completely from scratch, to your exact desired specifications, this chapter will explain the easiest possible approach to creating RNodes: Using common LoRa development boards. This approach can be boiled down to two simple steps: