When Bubba's ringing, you better get reeling.
Bubba Bell watches your rods so you don't have to. It feels the run and sets off a fob in your pocket that buzzes, flashes, and names the rod — for up to 8 rods, a full 1,000 yards down the bank. Built for good ol' American catfish, not re-badged EU carp gear.
The bite you miss is the one you weren't watching.
Ask anyone who runs a spread of rods for flatheads through the night and it's never "neat gadget." It's four hard-won reasons a wireless set earns its place on the bank.
Stop staring at rod tips.
Eight hours watching glowing tips in the dark fries your focus — your eyes start inventing bites. Clip the fob to your collar and cook, re-tie, or shut your eyes. It vibrates the second a rod loads up, so you save your energy for the fight.
No more ghost rings.
Current, wind and drifting weed dance your rod tips all night, and a spring bell just jingles until you want to launch it in the river. Bubba Bell learns the rhythm of the water and stays dead silent until a fish actually changes the line.
Silent where it counts.
No clip-on bell to ping off into the dark, and nothing to wake the whole shoreline — or tip off the guy next to you that the bite's on. Kill the sound on the bank, turn the fob up in your pocket. You hit the 3 a.m. run quietly.
Know the rod before your feet hit the mud.
Four rods across 40 yards of channel, and a screaming clicker in the dark costs you three seconds of "which one?" The fob names the rod and flashes its color the instant it fires — so you're on it before a big fish buries you in the timber.
"Good bite alarms cost more than the reel they sit behind. I wanted one I could trust on four rods overnight — and that I could open up and see exactly how it works."
Early-bird pricing goes to this list first.
Bubba Bell is finishing its hardware now. Join the list and you'll get first crack at early-bird pricing, plus word when the pilot units hit the water and when the independent review is published.
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Not a carp alarm with a catfish sticker.
The wireless alarms on the market are built for UK carp lakes — short-range, few rods, and a radio band that isn't even legal here. Bubba Bell was drawn from scratch for US bank and shore catfishing.
"Typical alarm" = mainstream wireless carp-style bite alarms; figures from published manufacturer specs. Range is our engineering target, being validated on pilot hardware.
The fob names the rod, and what happened.
No phone needed at the water. The pocket receiver buzzes, vibrates and flashes — you pick which — and its screen names the rod. The colour tells you the rest at a glance.
Green — armed & watching
Every rod is paired and quiet. The whole set is listening.
Amber — activity
Small knocks or a nibble worth a look — not yet a committed run.
Red — fish on
A rod has fired on a run or a drop-back. Red also shows if a rod goes silent, so a dead battery won't slip by unnoticed.
Your whole session, logged.
The fob relays to a companion app over Bluetooth when your phone's nearby. Set each rod's sensitivity, watch the spread at a glance, and keep a catch log that stamps every fish with the time and the spot — stored on your phone, no account, no cloud.
App screens are a design concept. The app ships alongside the set.
Green means it's watching. Red means fish on.
Artist's concept — not a photo of a finished unit.
The bank comes to your pocket.
A pocket fob with a belt clip and a keyring, sealed against bank weather. It hears every rod in the set, shows the one that fired on its screen, and lets you pick how it wakes you — buzzer, vibration, light, or all three. A chunky button acks a fish with cold, wet gloves on, and it charges over USB-C, designed to run weeks per top-up.
Planned for launch: a camp-light mode that glows your swim in the running rod's own color, so you know which one fired from across the bank without lifting a finger.
Design complete
Both boards routed and DRC-clean, engineering-reviewed, fab packages generated.
Pre-fab checks
Final footprint and parts-sourcing audit before the pilot order goes in.
Pilot fabrication
A small pilot run at the board house, hand-built and bring-up tested.
On the water
Bite-detection tuning, LoRa range and battery life proven on real hardware.
Independent review
Neutral third-party hardware and security review, then the design goes public.
Launch
The waitlist hears first.
What's inside.
Most alarm sets either cut the range, miss the subtle takes, or lock you into a closed box. Here's what we built instead.
1,000 yards of reach
A pre-certified 1 W LoRa radio (Fanstel SX1262, US915) reaches the fob about 1,000 yards down the bank — several times the range of a typical wireless alarm. No gateway, no Wi-Fi, no phone between the rod and you.
It feels the run, not the wind
A Bosch BMA400 motion sensor with an adaptive baseline tells a run and a drop-back from wind, wave and casting. No buttons to arm — it's always listening.
Knows if a rod walks off
The same sensor that feels a bite feels a rod being lifted from its holder. Step away and the fob still alerts you — theft warning built in, not a separate box you buy.
A season on one cell
A swappable, protected 18650 behind an O-ring cap runs an nRF52840 that sleeps between events, targeting around 50 days a charge. Swap a spare on the bank.
Eight rods, hard to spoof
Every packet is AES-128 encrypted and signed by an ATECC608B secure element, so the set next to you can't ring your fob and rods can't be silently swapped or cloned.
You'll get to see all of it.
We designed both boards ourselves in KiCad — four layers, solid ground planes for the radio, a power path stiff enough for the 1-watt burst, and a receiver that fits in a pocket. Here's the hardware that's heading to the pilot run. And because it's open, it's yours to keep running: repair it, improve it, print a new part, flash your own firmware — no sealed box that dies when its battery does.
The complete design — schematics, PCB, enclosure and firmware — will be published as open source once an independent hardware and security review by a neutral, respected third party is complete. We want the first public release to be one you can audit and trust.
Hardware under CERN-OHL-S v2, firmware open — with one honest caveat: the pre-certified LoRa and nRF radio modules carry their own closed internal firmware and grants; everything we design around them is open. Compliance work (FCC Part 15B, battery UN38.3) is scheduled ahead of any sale.
KiCadCERN-OHL-S v2OSHWLoRa · US915nRF52840 · BLE