I finally got some time to play with the #reticulum #rnode pair that I flashed a few days ago. Bidrectional messages passed over #lora succesfully using a pair of heltec v3. This was a little less user friendly than #meshtastic but very doable after watching the Andy Kirby youtube video (using newpipe in grapheneos as recommended in responses to my last post)

I like that reticulum is a full network stack that is encryption first. Much more flexible than the text only of meshtastic. Going to keep digging here. My other #hamradio gear is gathering a little dust.