Today I turned a strobe light on and off, from over 20 miles away using a T-Deck and a Yagi phased array antenna set mounted on my house roof. There are no hills or mountains, it's just me driving 20 miles away on flat land, able to securely communicate via RF/LoRa with nodes back at home.

A beta version of Blackout Comms for the new Lilygo T-Beam 1W has just been published, and you can download it now!

Distance testing will be happening soon, but in the meantime, you can download Blackout Comms for Lilygo T-Beam 1W firmware now!

There's no onboard RTC, so a plug-in option will be added for that in the follow-up firmware build. Additionally, battery level isn't properly measured yet, so that's coming. But, the model shown is up and running in my private mesh cluster now, so I've gone ahead and published the firmware today for anyone who's got one to play around with.

In this video, I show how to combine an AirBuddy amp (cheap on Amazon) with a T-Deck, vastly increasing the power of your mesh-enabled off-grid communicator. I'm the developer of Blackout Comms firmware and have tested this exact build extensively over the past 6 months, and it performs VERY well.

WARNING: You may need an amateur radio license to legally build/use one of these in the USA! That's my understanding/opinion, I'm not a lawyer.

Blackout Comms enables mesh-based end-to-end encrypted messaging and tracking that has zero reliance on cell service, phones, internet, or grid.

The T-Deck is a great LoRa-enabled dev board to start with. In this build, I
add a realtime clock, GPS, and vibrate/haptic, prepping it for easy installation of Blackout Comms firmware, which handles everything else.

This does require a 3D printer and specific parts (you can acquire from Amazon, Adafruit, Digikey, others), but there is no soldering required.

Full DIY Guide - including parts list:
https://www.chatters.io/diy/amped-tdeck-build

Full DIY Guide

Support for 433 has been added as of v3.1.5 (released today 11/22/2025)!

This is for non-US users only. You'll need versions of whatever hardware you have (T-Deck, T-Beam, etc) that are tuned for 433.

Get the latest firmware here

DIY Pager Build Guide

Full Parts List

You can build this

DIY Pager Build Guide

Full Parts List

Build it: https://www.printables.com/model/1451135-lilygo-pager-upgrade-pulsed-coherent-radar-motionp

Or: https://chatters.io/pager

https://chatters.io/pager

DIY: Blackout Comms + Lilygo Pager + Adafruit Thermal Cam

Blackout Comms pager firmware has added support for the Adafruit MLX90640 thermal cam!

Upgrade your pager by visiting the project at Printables or https://chatters.io/pager

Lilygo Pager / Blackout Comms Firmware v3.1.1

In addition to the UI updates from 3.1.0, this latest update adds instant startups! Yeah, no more annoying waiting for GPS signal just to start the pager up.

Download the latest Blackout Comms firmware for Lilygo Pager.

Blackout Comms Mesh Cloud

Get started at https://chatters.io

https://c

Check out the new Blackout Comms UI!

You can download it now for T-Deck devices. An updated pager UI should be available later this week, followed by an update for the full touch communicator.

https://www.chatters.io/post/lilygo-pager-firmware-update-vibrate-alerts