About Inland NW Mesh

Inland NW Mesh.org is a volunteer-driven community initiative dedicated to designing, building, and maintaining a decentralized, off-grid mesh communication network across the Inland Northwest. Our mission is to put resilient, community-owned connectivity into the hands of everyday people — particularly when traditional infrastructure fails.

Who We Are

We are a group of volunteers — radio enthusiasts, preppers, network engineers, and concerned neighbors — united by the belief that communities deserve communication infrastructure they own and control. No corporation, no government agency, no single point of failure.

We are currently operating as a community volunteer group and are in the process of filing for 501(c)(3) non-profit status, which will allow us to accept tax-deductible donations, apply for grants, and formalize our governance structure. Until that filing is complete, the group operates on donated time, equipment, and community goodwill.

Our Coverage Area

What started as a Spokane County initiative has grown rapidly into one of the largest community mesh networks in the Pacific Northwest. Our repeater nodes now span a massive geographic area — from the Spokane metro and Coeur d'Alene corridor, south through the Palouse and into the Lewiston/Clarkston valley, across rural Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho, and South Central Idaho.

New groups are forming across the region regularly. The Inland NW Mesh network is designed to grow — every new node extends coverage and adds redundancy for the entire region. We expect our footprint to continue expanding significantly across the Inland Northwest in the coming months as more communities join the mesh.

Core Goals

• Provide a robust backup communication layer for emergency and disaster scenarios
• Build and operate a fully decentralized network owned and maintained by the community, not a single entity
• Expand coverage across Spokane County, WA and Kootenai County, ID, with continued regional growth
• Remain free and open — no subscriptions, no central servers, no single point of failure
• Educate and empower residents to participate in and contribute to the network

Why It Matters

When earthquakes, wildfires, ice storms, or infrastructure attacks disable cellular towers and the internet, communities are left without the ability to coordinate. Inland NW Mesh.org exists to change that.

By deploying a mesh of independently powered, low-cost LoRa radio nodes across the region, we have built a communication backbone that operates completely independent of commercial infrastructure — surviving outages that silence every other channel.

Interested in deploying your own node? See our recommended hardware guide to get started.