[catherd]

There are a few more finished versions of this out there if you just want to use LoRa for text messaging. The Pinephone has a LoRa case, and you can buy a few devices pretty close to the one on Hackaday if you search for "Bobricus" on Tindie.

I made an ESP32 based phone that can send LoRa messages (among other things... the phone was designed to be hacked on).

https://wiphone.io

The back of the phone can be replaced by a custom PCB, sort of like project Ara except accessible to anyone who can design simple boards. One of the boards we designed is a LoRa radio and the phone book/contacts in the OS has a built-in field for a LoRa address.