One stack. A box, a protocol, and the apps that ride it.

Ham is out — up front, before anything else. FrogNet's wire traffic is differences against state the far end already holds — frames a third party cannot read without the memory they refer to. The prevailing reading of FCC Part 97.113(a)(4) treats that as a message encoded to obscure its meaning, and amateur bands prohibit those. So FrogNet does not transmit on amateur radio bands — stated here the same way it's stated in the book. And Reticulum is out with it, on the same rule for the same reason: every Reticulum packet is encrypted by design, and by the project's own account that cannot be turned off. Whatever you think of either stack, neither one can legally carry its traffic over ham spectrum in the US.

Now the honest part about the alternative. Look at how amateur traffic actually moves. The RF hop is audio — software modems pushing tones through a voice radio, the same idea as a dial-up modem and at kindred speeds: 1200-baud packet still keys the Bell 202 tones of the acoustic-coupler era, and even the best modern HF modes deliver a few kilobits. And the moment the message needs to go farther than the radio reaches, it backhauls over the internet: Winlink through CMS servers, AREDN islands joined by tunnels over home broadband, EchoLink voice over IP by name. The screech does the last mile; the internet does the miles — in the clear, because the bands require it. FrogNet was built on accepting that fact instead of dressing it up: when the path must cross the internet, it crosses inside a WireGuard tunnel you own, on your own flat 10/8, through a relay that cannot read a byte.

And transports combine — in one node, and across the network. A single node can carry several bearers at once, and a network mixes them by role: one machine is the tunnel gateway, another is the 900 MHz gateway, a third reaches its upstream on eth1 — and the fabric routes over whichever path reaches. The flagship call ran wired Wi-Fi, an encrypted internet tunnel, and a 900 MHz radio in one session. No node cares which bearer its neighbour used to get there.

The same property is what makes FrogNet mobile. A device does not care what the transport is, so when it comes in contact with another FrogNet it latches onto whatever medium is available — with no operator intervention in most cases. A node has been driven through Queens at traffic speed on exactly this behavior: the topology changed under the mesh block by block and the walk re-formed it, nobody touching anything. That is the differentiator with a human face: people do not have to be network or RF engineers to get things up and working in the field.

transport independence → discovery & route optimization → route resilience & fault tolerance → system survivability

Each stage exists because the one before it feeds it. Survivability isn't a feature bolted on at the top — it's the last link of a chain that begins with refusing to care what the wire is.