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I "play" with LoRa and LoRaWAN devices for work so can add a few comments here to help you on this. Apologies if I'm repeating stuff you already know. LoRa (I'm going to use LoRa and LoRaWAN interchangeably cause I'm lazy) is a small packet unidirectional periodic communications protocol. More accurately you can talk to it from the gateway to the device but for class A it only opens for a very short period after it transmits, class c is always receiving but at the cost of battery life. Because it uses small packets it has limited things to send (and is encoded so needs to be decoded at the receiver so to make it simple you will want to limit what is sent). It is NOT for real time communications ie send and receive now. I have seen an article which suggested using LoRa instead of pagers for emergency services but that has limits. In terms of the system you would require to make this idea work you would need gateways (or access public gateways if available), a server stack so either Chirpstack if you want to run your own server and device manager, or use the Things Network for a managed server more info on servers. Each device that you want on your network needs to be activated and registered which if you are thinking of making it widely available becomes difficult in managing and scaling. In terms of security it's pretty good. I had a 15 second look at that link someone else has posted and have made a LoRa device with the FiPy, it's easy to get going (lots of python libraries and example code) but challenging to program well. As I said I've done a lot of research and playing with these trying to build a private network for work; I've tried to be concise but hopefully covered most things. Ideas for disaster work are critical so even if this idea doesn't pan out keep up the good work and keep the ideas coming.
