Mumble VS NoiseTorch

I think Sonobus is overkill. I suggest you look at a couple of relatively old-school gamer voice chat tools - Mumble or Teamspeak. Mumble is open-source and the connection is always encrypted, Teamspeak is commercial but the free tier should be fine for you - but you have to make sure to manually turn encryption on yourself. It has been a long time since I used either, so I don't know which is easier. Both of them require you to run their matching server software.

Mumble's latency is unbeatable imo, it's basically their main focus and shows.

The sticking point for me is the lack of persistent messages, something the devs strangely think is a privacy plus. Issue open since 2016: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/2560

If you drop out for a minute you won't have access to anything that was posted in chat, which makes it useless for anything other than voice only comms, that might suit some business purposes but I've always needed to post links or screenshots in chat during meetings.

There's any number of alternative chat applications available, like Element, Mumble, Teamspeak etc.

Mumble?

I think Mumble might fit what you're looking for. It's been a very long time since I've used it, but it seems to still exist: https://www.mumble.info/ - I've used previously for exactly what you're describing, events with lots of crew dispersed around and no budget for radios. I had it installed on an AP running OpenWRT so it was just a case of plugging that in and getting people to install the app and connect to it.

Along with the options already mentioned, if you're not into TeamSpeak, there is an open source alternative called Mumble which operates in the same manner. No internet required, and is supported on multiple platforms.

Noisetorch. https://github.com/noisetorch/NoiseTorch

Interesting! How does it compare with NoiseTorch/RNNoise?

Interesting! I'm currently using NoiseTorch-ng. Although NoiseTorch works well, I don't like that you need to reload NoiseTorch every time you change a setting.

I till now haven't figured out how to setup noise reduction in PipeWire. In Pulse, it was very easy. At the present, I'm using https://github.com/noisetorch/NoiseTorch.

(I do like PipeWire)

You could always try NoiseTorch. https://github.com/noisetorch/NoiseTorch

Maybe it will be possible to integrate this or something like this to SteamOS, given it's using PipeWire: https://github.com/noisetorch/NoiseTorch

If Apex allows you to select a mic, you can make a virtual (filtered) one with noisetorch.

Don't know if you are looking for the same - NoiseTorch - Works like a charm.