Four parts. A line of fibre through the passage, nodes that make it usable, a gateway computer at the entrance and the cloud dashboard on the surface.
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A node sits in the passage and turns the fibre line into a pocket of short-range radio coverage, so a handset in that chamber can reach the surface.
Lightweight optical fibre, spooled out along the passage as the team advances and reeled back in on the way out.
A computer at the entrance, connected by a USB cable to the first node. It keeps every message locally, shows the line on its own web page and passes the traffic to whatever network is available on the surface.
A web dashboard for following deployments from anywhere: which nodes are up, what has been said, and a way to reply.
A node sits in the passage and turns the fibre line into a pocket of short-range radio coverage, so a handset in that chamber can reach the surface.
Nodes are placed where coverage is wanted rather than at fixed intervals: a chamber, a junction, the top of a pitch, the spot where a team will be working. Each one is a link in the fibre chain and a radio cell in its own right, so adding one both extends the line and lights another part of the cave. The coverage of any single node is a pocket, not a blanket: that is a deliberate choice, because covering a chamber with short-range radio is cheap and dependable, while covering a whole system with radio alone is neither.
Released by IRNAS in September 2026. Range, data rate, node spacing and battery life are answered per deployment.
Lightweight optical fibre, spooled out along the passage as the team advances and reeled back in on the way out.
Fibre is indifferent to everything that defeats radio underground: rock, water, bends, pitches and electrical noise. It carries messages and data over far more distance than radio manages underground. What makes it usable here rather than merely possible is weight: the cable is light enough to be carried in and paid out by hand, which is why LoCave can be laid at around five times the pace of conventional cabling. It is designed to be joined and repaired underground, because a cable in a cave will eventually be damaged and the interesting question is how quickly it comes back. Where it is damaged, or not laid at all, the nodes on either side link over radio instead.
A computer at the entrance, connected by a USB cable to the first node. It keeps every message locally, shows the line on its own web page and passes the traffic to whatever network is available on the surface.
The gateway is an ordinary computer, a small PC or a Raspberry Pi, with one LoCave node on a USB cable. That node is the base node: the line continues from it over fibre and radio, and the other nodes show it as neighbour 0. The gateway stores every message, node status and Bluetooth sighting on its own disk, so it works with no internet at all, and it confirms every message back to the node, which is the tick a caver sees on the phone. On the local network it hosts its own web page, without a login, in English and Slovenian: the live messages, a diagram of the line with its USB, fibre and radio links as the nodes report them, and the settings. Whenever an internet connection is available, mobile, satellite or a cable at a show cave, it uploads everything to the LoCave cloud and picks up the messages and pings sent from the dashboard; when the connection drops, nothing is lost, it simply catches up later. Optionally it relays the messages into a Telegram group and broadcasts the outdoor weather at its location to every node.
A web dashboard for following deployments from anywhere: which nodes are up, what has been said, and a way to reply.
Everything the gateway can see is worth keeping somewhere the whole team can reach. The LoCave cloud is that place. A deployment is followed live: the messages as they arrive, the line with its nodes and links, and a map with the deployment placed where its gateway is. From the dashboard a message can be sent to all nodes or to one, and a node can be pinged, with the round-trip time shown when it answers. Alerts by e-mail or SMS cover a gateway that goes offline, a base node that loses its radio, a node that falls silent and a new message from a node. The record of a deployment can be exported as CSV. Organisations manage their own users and roles, and the dashboard is in English and Slovenian. It runs over the gateway’s internet connection, so it is available to people who are nowhere near the cave, and it is optional: the gateway and the Telegram relay work without it.
Real nodes on the bench at IRNAS, September 2026. Photographs, not renders.
Send us the survey, the passage, or just the problem. We will tell you plainly whether LoCave is the right answer, including when it is not.