CairnOS
Off-Grid LoRa Mesh Messaging
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Text friends, run repeaters and watch your channel live over a MeshCore LoRa radio. No cell service, no internet, no accounts. Just your radio and the mesh.
Cairn is a companion app for MeshCore LoRa mesh radios. Pair your radio over Bluetooth or WiFi and send messages through a community-built network of radios and repeaters, with no cell service, no internet and no account.
MESSAGING
- Direct messages, channels and room servers in one inbox, with filters
- Public, private and hashtag channels; share or join a channel by QR code
- Delivery status, with retry for failed sends
- Emoji reactions, @mentions, forwarding, search and text selection
- Path details for each message: every hop on a list and a map
- On-device translation of incoming messages
- Chats kept on a Cairn touch radio come over to the app when you pair
- Block contacts or channel senders, filter keywords and mute conversations
- Optional link previews, with a warning for known malware links
DASHBOARD
- Battery, network, radio, GPS, contacts and chats at a glance
- Sunrise and sunset for your position and the radio's temperature sensor
- Radio presets by region, or set frequency, bandwidth, spreading factor, coding rate and TX power yourself
NODES & REPEATERS
- Saved and heard nodes, with search, sort, filters and a card or list layout
- A page for every node, with a map, readings and quick actions
- Log in to your repeaters and room servers to see status, telemetry, neighbors and an SNR map, then change settings, access lists and regions or use the remote CLI
- Send commands to your own companion radios over the mesh (MeshCore 1.18 firmware)
- Telemetry history charts kept on your phone
- Contact groups, QR sharing and a manual path editor
SPECTRUM
- Live noise floor and packet traffic on your frequency
- Signal margin, airtime share and packets per minute
- With a Cairn radio: the radio's own Channel view, with its trace, density heat map and 24-hour noise floor
MAPS & GPS
- Mesh map with standard, satellite and topographic layers
- Live traffic layer: the links packets crossed lately, and each new packet as it arrives
- Download map regions for offline use
- Radio and phone GPS side by side, with a compass and a navigation HUD that points the way to any node
TOOLS
- Network Health, Scan for Nodes, Trace Path, Line of Sight with terrain and Fresnel zone, RX Log and a CLI terminal
- Sign and verify messages with your radio's identity
IN THE CAR & AROUND iOS
- CarPlay: a dashboard of your radio, mesh, messages and location, a GPS page, and messages you hear and answer with Siri
- Siri and Shortcuts: check radio status, send a message or send an advert
- Live Activity and Dynamic Island with connection, battery and unread count
- Multiple windows on iPad
MAKE IT YOURS
- Choose a color, gradient or photo background with glass cards over it
- Give any node a photo or a color: its type's color, one of twelve shades or any color you pick
- Backup and restore, plus CSV and GPX export
PRIVACY
Your messages travel radio to radio. Cairn has no accounts, no analytics and no developer server. Nothing is sent to the developer.
REQUIREMENTS
Requires a LoRa radio running MeshCore companion firmware, connected over Bluetooth or WiFi. Maps, link previews and Line of Sight elevation use the internet when it is available. Requires iOS 18 or later.
Cairn is free and open source software under the GNU GPL v3, built on the work of the open-source MeshCore app community. Source code is linked from our support page.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app has not received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Version 1.2 is about speed: connecting and syncing take less time, and big node lists stay quick.
NEW
- Remove Heard Nodes: Settings › Nodes › Remove Nodes clears the whole Heard list in one step. It says how many first and asks you to confirm. Saved nodes stay, and a node comes back if your radio hears it again.
IMPROVED
- Faster connect with a full node list: Cairn fetches only what changed, and downloads the whole list only when the radio's count and the app's differ. That also catches nodes removed on the radio while the app was away.
- Faster Bluetooth on Cairn firmware for ESP32 radios.
- Stock firmware: quicker connects, with no Cairn-only requests each time and no 5-second wait on older firmware.
- Removing many nodes on the radio updates the app in one go instead of row by row.
- The Traffic map pins only your saved and heard nodes, not every node heard in the last 7 days. Packets through relays you don't have still animate, and those relays are listed as off the map. Show Quiet Nodes and the Map tab's traffic layer follow the same rule.
FIXED
- A deleted node leaves the Traffic map, Line of Sight and Trace Path at once, including Trace Path's node picker.
FIRMWARE
Everything in 1.2 works with stock MeshCore and with current Cairn firmware.
The developer, Christopher Van Hoose, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Size
- 57 MB
- Category
- Utilities
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 18.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 18.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 18.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 15.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 2.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Location
- This app may use your location even when it is not open, which can decrease device battery life.
- Languages
English and 11 more
- English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Ukrainian
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Provider
Christopher Van Hoose
- Christopher Van Hoose has not identified itself as a trader for this app. If you are a consumer in the European Economic Area, consumer rights do not apply to agreements between you and the provider.
- Copyright
- © 2026 CVH Visuals

