// the find
buildwithparallel/haven-manet-ip-mesh-radio
Haven – MANET IP Mesh Radio toolkit
Haven is a toolkit for building decentralized IP mesh networks using HaLow (802.11ah) radios on Raspberry Pi hardware, glued together with BATMAN-adv routing and OpenMANET firmware. It targets off-grid comms: disaster response, remote sites, ATAK/TAK situational awareness. You bring the Pi and the Morse Micro radio HAT; this repo provides the setup scripts and integration glue.
The HaLow choice is genuinely smart — 802.11ah's sub-1GHz spectrum punches through foliage and buildings where 2.4/5GHz dies, and 1-10km node-to-node range is plausible with proper antennas. BATMAN-adv is a proven kernel-space mesh protocol, not a reinvented wheel. The integration stack (Reticulum for encrypted overlay, ADS-B to CoT for TAK, LoRa sidecar) is modular and opt-in rather than bolted-on bloat. Documentation is unusually thorough for a hardware project — tested USB device lists, HaLow MCS tables, and runbooks that show someone has actually debugged this in the field.
The repo is mostly shell scripts and docs wrapping third-party firmware — there's very little original code to evaluate. Pi 5 support is explicitly experimental and not recommended for production, which limits adoption of the newer hardware. HaLow radio availability is the real adoption wall: Morse Micro MM601X HATs are not commodity parts, and the BOM is hardware-specific enough that you can't easily substitute. Default credentials are embarrassingly weak (password 'havenblue', SSID 'blue') and buried in a collapsed detail block — that's going to bite someone who forgets to change them before field deployment.