the promise
Two decks. Hers and hers. One promise.
My wife and I both live in Ventura and both work in Santa Barbara, thirty miles up the coast. But our schedules run opposite each other, so on any given day we can be anywhere from thirty to a hundred miles apart, depending on where I am posted. The road between runs through fire country, flood country, mudslide country, and long stretches with no signal at all. In an emergency the network is the first thing to fail you, whether it goes down, jams with everyone calling at once, or was never there in those hills to begin with.
On Tenterhooks is a pair of homemade radios designed for the gap. Not the disaster itself. The stretch right after it, when you have sent the message and you are waiting to find out if it landed. Painfully anxious suspense while you wait to hear back. That is what the name means, and that is the feeling the build is designed to end as fast as it can.
It is a small act of devotion you can hold in one hand.
The two decks will run Meshtastic, off-grid LoRa mesh radio. No towers. No servers. No internet. Messages hop device to device, and ours would reach each other through the existing Southern California mesh: a quiet community of strangers who all chose to keep a node running. We are not alone against the world. We are connected through people we will never meet.
