That’s exactly the goal of the Meshtastic project, which aims to take off-the-shelf ESP32 LoRa development boards ... printing a case for your particular board. The first time around you ...
The Meshtastic radio magic comes from LoRa, a wireless protocol running on the sub-1 GHz bands. One of the winning features of that band is that no amateur license is required, up to a 1 W ...