You are a person. Your radio is a piece of hardware. In Nelos, those are two different things on purpose - your identity lives in the app on your phone, and the radio underneath is just how your messages get there.
Here's the question this whole app is built around: if you're the person using it, why should replacing, borrowing, losing, or upgrading your radio turn you into a stranger to your own team?
Most people don't think about it until it happens - a battery connector comes loose, a unit cracks on a rock, or someone hands you a spare because yours died on day two. Once you're carrying different hardware, does your team still know it's you? In Nelos, the answer is yes, by design: your identity stays exactly where it was, and the radio underneath is free to change.
A person and a radio are not the same kind of thing. You are a name, a history with your team, a set of conversations. A radio is a small box that turns your messages into radio waves and back again. One of those matters to the people around you; the other is a replaceable part.
Nelos treats that distinction as the whole design, not an afterthought. The person and the team are first-class concepts; the radio is the transport layer underneath them, nothing more. That's a deliberate architectural choice - and it's the opposite of how a lot of mesh software works, where the hardware itself is the identity, and you're expected to think of yourself as a node.
The first time you install Nelos, it generates a private identifier and saves it on your phone. That identifier - not anything the radio reports - is what labels your messages, your location, and your place in your team's roster.
Connect a different compatible radio, and Nelos sees a new physical unit, but your own identifier hasn't moved, so nothing about how your team sees you changes either. Nelos re-establishes your team's connection in the background automatically. The one moment it asks you anything is if the new radio's frequency settings don't already match what your team expects - then it shows a short confirmation so you can pick which settings to use, rather than guessing. Pairing itself is still a real step: you connect the new radio over Bluetooth like any other device, it isn't instant the first time - but once it's paired, you're still you.
None of this asks you to think in terms of nodes or devices. The app is organized around people and teams; the radio is just how the messages get there.
Not every LoRa mesh app makes this same choice, and it's worth a short, factual look at why - without turning this into a scorecard. Nelos itself is built on the MeshCore protocol, so this isn't a criticism of that technology, just a note on where different software chooses to keep identity.
Meshtastic generates a keypair on the radio itself, and Meshtastic's own documentation says node identity has historically been derived from the device's hardware MAC address[1]. The project has publicly discussed changing that in a future firmware update[2], but today, resetting or replacing a node is understood to produce a new identity.
The official MeshCore companion app also generates its Ed25519 keypair on the physical radio. MeshCore's own documentation describes reading or setting a device's private key over a serial/USB connection, but only for repeaters and room servers - infrastructure, not the companion radio a person carries[3]. Its Export/Import Settings feature backs up a device's own configuration around a factory reset - recovering the same unit[4] - rather than handing an identity to different hardware.
In both cases, identity lives on the radio because that's where the software put it. Nelos put it in the app instead, because a team needs to recognize the person, not the box they're currently carrying.
This model has one honest edge, and it's worth stating plainly: your identity lives on your phone, tied to that one app install - not to an account, because Nelos doesn't have accounts. Reinstalling the app, clearing its data, or moving to a new phone currently starts a fresh identity. There's no backup or restore for it yet.
That's a real limitation, and a different problem from the one this guide is about - it moves the risk from the radio to the phone's own app data, rather than removing it. We'd rather say that plainly than overclaim what's solved.
That's the whole idea. A radio is a replaceable part, not your identity. Whichever compatible unit ends up in your pack, your team still sees the same person on the other end.
Nelos is an independent application built on the MeshCore protocol, not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Meshtastic or MeshCore projects. Sources, checked directly against official documentation:
Nelos brings group messaging, location sharing, and a shared group map with location updates to LoRa mesh — with no cell service, no server, and no account.
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