It started because I could not get the range I expected with Meshtastic on my Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V4.3 boards, and actually, instead of searching out why, I got interested in writing some basic communication app, so I stripped things down to the sx1262 communication and built a minimal testbed.
TrailText sends encrypted text messages through this chain: phone → BLE → ESP32 → LoRa → ESP32 → BLE → phone
The goal: text when networks fail.
The repo also includes a LoRa Ping tool to test antennas, RSSI, SNR, round-trip time and range before moving to actual messaging.