Thank you to Patrick Gartner for writing in and sharing Backtrail Pro, a new iOS and Android app that brings discontinued goTenna Mesh radios back into use and also supports Meshtastic. The goTenna Mesh is a pocket-sized 1 W radio for the 902 - 928 MHz ISM band that pairs with a phone over Bluetooth for mesh texting without cell service.

The company behind goTenna Mesh has since shifted focus to military and public safety customers with its goTenna Pro line. In 2024, the security researchers who disclosed a series of goTenna vulnerabilities noted that goTenna discontinued support for the goTenna v1 and Mesh and exited the civilian market, around the same time CISA published its advisories on the Pro line. The consumer app has since disappeared, and goTenna was acquired by defense autonomy company Forterra in October 2025, leaving many owners with working radios and no app. With no vendor support, it's also unlikely that the Mesh's disclosed vulnerabilities, such as spoofed message injection with an SDR, will ever be patched.

Backtrail Pro talks to the goTenna Mesh through an independent implementation of its Bluetooth protocol, building on earlier community reverse engineering work. It supports group and direct messages, delivery receipts, location sharing, and optional AES-256 encryption. For Meshtastic radios, it lists every node heard and can change basic radio settings. The goTenna Mesh uses FSK rather than LoRa, so the two radio types can't talk to each other directly. However, with one of each connected to the phone, an optional relay can re-send group messages between the goTenna group and the Meshtastic mesh. The app costs US$0.99 on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store with no account or servers, and the code is open-source under GPL-3.0 and available on GitHub.

AI Disclaimer: The Backtrail commit on GitHub lists Claude as a co-author.