I think it’s still a valid question if you frame it along the lines of “something useful at protests, but also in everyday peaceful life”.

Meshtastic LoRa is worth looking into if you’re going to protests with friends/family/cohorts. You can get a waterproof, GPS enabled, credit-card sized module with multi-day battery life and no flashing required for $35 (T1000-E). That’s specifically because it can also be used when hiking, going to festivals, or just for fun.

I was just at a Mardi Gras parade and text messages couldn’t go through due to network congestion from too many people. With a couple of meshtastic devices our phones could still text each other and see our GPS positions on a map. All with encryption enabled.

Love the idea so much that I tried it. Turns out a url for a babel page is around 2,000 bytes :-(

No worries! If you’re starting out you can’t go wrong with a T1000-E. It’s water resistant, has GPS built-in, and ties everything together in a neat package for ~$35. There are plenty of other nodes out there but it’s more of a build your own kit situation. If you’re into microcontroller programming and stuff like arduino/RP/etc then Heltec v3 Lora boards are good tinker hardware.

We also have a community here on mander for meshtastic.

Yes! If you leave the default channel enabled it will join the public meshtastic network. But you can run eight channels at once, and the others can have different encryption keys.

The default setting is also to forward any received packets to the mesh, even ones it can’t decrypt.

For a good compromise, use Meshtastic. Long-range radio mesh network for texting that phones can use instead of cell networks.

No idea about bike licenses.

High power radios in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing can cause a lot of issues. FRS/GMRS radios under 2 Watts in the U.S. don’t need a license. Licensing is a way to make sure people using them know how to do so effectively, and provides for stiffer penalties if someone unlicensed causes issues.

Welch’s Fruit Snacks. The Halloween packs are small and very snacky, only $0.10 each at costco.