Everything below is in the current Outpost software — the Android app, the radio firmware and the T-Deck's own screens, the Wear OS watch and the desktop console — all speaking one protocol over the mesh. No accounts, no cloud, no cell service. What isn't out yet is at the bottom, labeled as such.
Talk to the group — and know whether the mesh actually carried it.
A room is a named conversation tuned to what you're doing: CONVOY rooms lead with driving tools, BASECAMP with bulletins, TRAIL with waypoints and navigation. The category sets the emphasis and the defaults — it never locks a feature away.
A private room has its own random encryption key. Anyone in range can relay its traffic, but only key-holders can read a word. Joining takes one invite code — or a QR scan — with no accounts and no servers.
A DM is marked “✓ delivered” only when the other radio actually acknowledges it. Room messages claim only “sent” — the mesh can't prove a broadcast was carried, so Outpost doesn't pretend it can. Receipts never claim more than the mesh proved.
Ask the room a question with 2–4 options and watch the votes tally live. A poll can carry an expiry — 15 minutes to 24 hours — and when it closes, the result is posted into the thread as a message, so it's still there tomorrow.
Pin the plan where the whole camp sees it: the latest bulletin sits at the top of a Basecamp room. Bulletins can be posted in any room — Basecamp just leads with its composer.
Every room carries the same tools — waypoints, check-ins, polls, bulletins, the map — ordered so the one your activity needs most comes first and widest. In chat, polls and extras live right under the composer, where you're already typing.
Long-press a message to react — in the standard Meshtastic format, so the official app sees them too. Received messages show when they arrived, their signal (SNR/RSSI), and how many hops they traveled to reach you.
Built for the day something goes wrong — and for proving you're fine the rest of the time.
One press broadcasts an SOS with your position on the public channel — public on purpose, because the strangers two ridges over may be closest — repeating about every minute while nearby nodes relay it. Your profile card rides with it, medical note included, whatever your privacy settings say.
Ask your room for non-emergency help — a tug, a jump start, tools — with a calm alert. No siren, no public broadcast.
One tap tells your room “I'm OK” — from the app, the deck, or your watch. Scheduled check-ins (30/60/120 minutes) are reminder-first — your device nags you to tap — with a small budget of clearly labeled automatic check-ins, never more than three, if a tap is missed.
Arm a return time. If you haven't checked in or moved by the deadline plus a grace period, your group is notified with your last known position. A dead-man switch for the backcountry.
See where everyone is, where you're headed, and what the mesh can reach.
Nodes and waypoints on street or satellite tiles in the console — plus an offline plot that needs no network at all — and the same map opens as an overlay in the app. In the console you can search for a place by name, jump straight to your radio's position, and right-click the map to drop a waypoint or plant a fixed position. Every position shown respects the sharing precision its owner chose.
Drop a waypoint — camp, water, fuel, a viewpoint, a hazard — and share it with the whole room over the mesh. No internet, no sync account.
Trackers and moving nodes lay down breadcrumbs as they go, so the group can see the route taken — and retrace it when someone needs to backtrack.
Every node gets a card: signal, hops, position and distance, battery, last heard, hardware — and its Node Type once it has shared a profile. In the app, the card's badge is itself a gauge: its color tracks the reading you pick — signal, distance, battery, last heard, or hops.
Ask the mesh how packets reach a node and get the route back as node names — the fastest way to spot a coverage hole before it matters.
First aid, knots, water and recovery know-how, plus sunrise, sunset and moon data computed on the device itself. No network needed, ever.
Your recorded track, check-ins, waypoints and SOS events in one log — exportable when you're back in range of a desk.
Know who — and what — every node on the mesh is, and control exactly who knows you.
Your profile is stored on the radio itself, and the radio answers requests for it even with your phone off — the app and console are just its editors. A tiny fingerprint beacon can announce “my profile changed” without re-sending the whole thing.
Every profile declares what the node is: Person, Vehicle, Outpost, Repeater, Station or Tracker. A Person's Category says what they're out doing — Offroader/Overlander, Camper/RVer, Explorer/Traveler, Hiker, Hunting/Fishing, First Responder, or Leisure — and vehicles and trackers carry their own type lists.
Five tiers — Public, Friends, Room members, Ask, Off — decide who gets your profile when they ask. The medical block has its own, usually tighter, audience, and is never included in public profile broadcasts. Only an SOS overrides that — deliberately.
Friend requests travel over the mesh itself; the other side accepts in their app, and if you request each other at once, the requests cross and complete on their own. Your friend list syncs to your radio, so it can vouch for a friend while your phone is off.
A plain stock-firmware radio — a tracker, say — can't hold a profile of its own. An Outpost radio hosts one for it and answers on its behalf, shown honestly as “via” the host, with the same audiences enforced.
A Person profile can link to its vehicle node, and lists render it both ways: the person shows their rig, and the rig shows its crew.
One system across handhelds, relays, trackers — and your wrist.
Node Roles give each radio its mesh job: Scout (the everyday node), Sentinel (a fixed relay), Drifter (a tracker), Rover (a vehicle node that lives in the rig), Homestead (a radio planted at an outpost or basecamp as the group's home base — it relays like a client and always carries traffic for favorite nodes, holding a fixed position), Station (a fixed sensor node). That's separate from Node Type — a handheld riding in a truck is still a Scout; the truck is what its profile says.
On a T-Deck, the firmware's own screens run the whole show — Home, Nodes, Chat, SOS, Rooms, Profile, Setup — with live widgets for signal, mesh traffic, and sun & position. Wake it from sleep and Outpost is what comes back, never the stock screens.
Sentinels, solar nodes and fixed stations extend the mesh from high ground and camp. Set them up, forget them — traffic routes through them on its own, for days off-grid.
Radios can report device and environment telemetry — temperature, air quality, power and health metrics — plus a watched-pin detection sensor (“door opened”), and counts of nearby Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices, all configured from the console.
Check in, send quick replies, and raise or cancel SOS from your wrist, with a status screen for your node, battery and the last message. The watch pairs to a radio directly over Bluetooth, or works through the phone app.
Full builds for LilyGo T-Deck handhelds and the Seeed SenseCAP Indicator, a headless build for Tanmatsu, and stock trackers as full mesh members via hosted profiles. OFFGRID TACTIX's own Scout, Sentinel, Drifter and Rover hardware is in prototype.
Small downloadable apps that run on your deck and your phone — sandboxed, on purpose.
Browse the catalog from the deck (over Wi-Fi, apps stored on its SD card) or in the phone app, and tap Get. Before anything installs, the package's size and SHA-256 fingerprint are checked against the catalog. Updates are badge-only — never installed behind your back.
An app gets only the abilities it declares — the packet feed, positions, node lookups, its own storage. Never your encryption keys, never the radio's settings, no network from inside an app. An app that crashes three times is switched off automatically, and tells you why.
RF Monitor — live signal, which also powers a widget on the Home screens. Airtime — channel usage against the duty-cycle limit. Mesh Surveyor — map where the mesh reaches, by probing nodes or just listening. Signal Meter — live SNR and RSSI straight off the air. Breakout — a game, for camp.
The workbench: one file in your browser, plugged into a radio.
The console is a single HTML file that runs in Chrome or Edge and talks to a radio over USB. Open it and you're at the workbench — connect, nodes, chat and rooms, map, profile, settings, backup, and a live radio log. Its room list is read from the connected radio's own channels — what you see is what the radio actually carries.
Settings are grouped by category — owner, device, channels, GPS, connectivity, power, LoRa, sensors, and an Advanced tier for deep RF and key material. Change anything anywhere and the Save in the header commits all of it; each section marks itself while it has unsaved changes, and every write is read-modify-write, so a console save never wipes a setting made from another client. Key material is never displayed.
Every channel carries its own position precision: Precise, fuzzed to a fixed grid cell (about 1, 3, 5 or 10 miles), or Don't broadcast at all. One default for public rooms, one for private rooms, and a per-room override that sticks.
Export rooms (private keys included), your profile and your settings as one encrypted file — AES-256, and your passphrase is never stored. Restore it and the console replays your rooms onto a fresh or wiped radio in one click.
Every node as a card: live search, sorting by last heard, favorites, distance, hops, signal or name. Right-click a node for a direct message, a position or profile request, show-on-map — or Invite to Room, which sends that node the room's invite code as a DM. Profiles the console files are kept between sessions, so a node's identity survives a browser restart.
Before you plant a relay, estimate its reach: the console map draws RF coverage circles from your antenna height, power and terrain type — the same planner, with the same math, as the Android app. Layers persist between sessions, and every circle is labeled what it is: a planning estimate, not a measurement.
The console flashes firmware over USB with an image-aware plan it states in the log before writing anything, a Force Download Mode probe for stubborn boards, and a full-erase option that stays off unless you arm it on purpose.
Flashing also lives on its own page: pick your device from a picture gallery — or let the page detect the radio on the cable — choose the Current/Stable or ProtoBox channel, back the radio up, then flash. Every listed image is verified a true factory image before it ships.
No dates, no promises — just an honest split between what's built and what's on the workbench.
Want the full detail? The User Manual (PDF) covers every screen, and the Expansion Apps page lists the add-on catalog.
