Crazy LORA ranges today (opens in new tab)

Some context: LoRa is a new, private and spread-spectrum modulation technique which allows sending data at extremely low data-rates to extremely long ranges. The low data-rate (down to few bytes per second) and LoRa modulation lead to very low receiver sensitivity (down to -134 dBm), which combined to an output power of +14 dBm means extremely large link budgets: up to 148 dB., what means more than 22km (13.6 miles) in LOS links and up to 2km (1.2miles) in NLOS links in urban environment (going through buildings).

From https://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/extrem...

LoRa has become the tool of choice for the high altitude balloon community. At least in the UK, you're restricted to 10mW in the 434MHz band when airborne. People have been pretty successful at getting (very) slow-scan video from balloons at 30km altitude.

I’ve done Long Island to Virginia with 3W on a portable at 146 MHz, but the range being seen on 800-900 MHz around Netherlands is quite amazing.

I would agree it must be tropospheric ducting; I’m not aware of any other propagation mode that could be at work here.

503'ing here for me, so here's an cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Also, I've been part of the group looking at LoRa at Lancaster University for some time, and am currently working on part of a commercial deployment too. Here are a few papers published on the topic by Dr. Martin Bor, and occasionally myself (all the top ones are LoRa): https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=WhN1gGwAAAAJ&hl=...

I'm soldering a a LoRA-based board right now. During design process we calculated the power budget and found out the power consumption is so absurdly low the main factor is battery shelf life.

We live in the future.

Is it me or maybe you also have doubds about LoRaWAN use cases? (LoRa is physical layer, way of encoding bits with rf, but you need protocol. LoRaWAN is open standard, which is being implemented and used by TTN community)

So for me main drawback of LoRaWAN is limited number of ACKed packets (gateway which can talk to thousands devices can use only 1% of airtime (simplified) and you have to divide it by number of users https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/duty-cycle.htm...), so you are allowed to have 10 packets per day. Any other data can be send in way called " send and pray"...

Would you build industrial device for telemetry while you can not be sure about your data? For example energy monitoring with 15 min periods. You can't be sure that your data arrives.

So ranges presented here is matter of luck but not reliable link.

Maybe ISM band limitations should adopt to LoRa which is more resistant to errors.

Or protocol should be changed (symphonylink has protocol for unlimited ACKed frames, OTA etc)

Just my 2 cents.

Archive link:

https://archive.is/e7oGG

That article should probably start with a couple of sentences answering "What is LORA?"