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How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

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Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#81

Post by th0ma5 »

olympus wrote: post #14
th0ma5 wrote: post #2

Lower power, but highly processed radio signals are fascinating to me. I've been playing with WSPR on the 10 meter band which is fixing (hopefully) to open up a little here over the next couple of months. With about 1/10th of the power of my Wi-Fi router and a long wire over top of the house, I've been picked up so far this year in California from Ohio. Last year I was heard almost daily in Europe. A blogger I follow…

What's your callsign? I'll see if I can pick you up with my RTL-SDR+Ham-it-up and maybe once I have my ham license I'll talk back. Every now and then I find a post on HN that really makes my day and I realize how awesome this community is and how our interests overlap beyond computer programming and entrepreneurship. This is one of them.

Well, I'd appreciate a report on the WSPRNet page once you get your ticket. I'm W8KV, but I don't know that I'm putting out all that much, and when I look at streetview of the houses of the people that pick up the signal they have some crazy setups! That said, I was able to receive PSK31 from France here in Ohio back before I got my ticket with just an old AC extension cord strung along the ceiling as an antenna, so keep playing with things, you never know what all will work.

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#82

Post by TeMPOraL »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #51
jazzyk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool stuff, sure. But, in my opinion, IoT will be slow to take off until the security aspect is solved - and it is a tough one.

I can't think of any other technologies that have waited for the security aspect to be solved, can you?

Solving security aspect will mean much less hackability, which means slowing down its development.

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#83

Post by dmritard96 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

> So now you can buy a radio chip for a few bucks and add it to any device. Can someone tell me some names of those radio chips? I'm in Shenzhen, if they exist they should be available here. I want to buy some for a few bucks.

Agreed. Seriously doubt there is some fundamentally new chips or anything. My suspicion is like, a cc430 + a front end radio amp lol

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#84

Post by Animats »

The main innovation here is battery life. You can do most of these things now with two-way pager technology.[1] There are a lot of commercial air conditioning units and vending machines phoning home that way right now. They all have AC power, so battery life isn't an issue.

Two way pagers have more or less died out for humans, but for M2M (machine to machine) communication they are alive and well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFLEX

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#86

Post by jasonjs »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

> So now you can buy a radio chip for a few bucks and add it to any device. Can someone tell me some names of those radio chips? I'm in Shenzhen, if they exist they should be available here. I want to buy some for a few bucks.

These radios have been available for quite some time, it's the Semtech SX127x line (e.g. SX1276). I was looking into LoRa and other long-range IoT WAN radios about a year ago for a research project.

You can get cheap (22 USD) Arduino-compatible development boards here using HopeRF modules, which work great with the RadioHead library:

http://www.anarduino.com/miniwireless/ http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/RadioHead/

(I have no affiliation with the websites.)

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#87

Post by KaiserPro »

if anyone wants to play with LoRa you might want to play with the RFM 69

http://rdepablos.merlitec.com/mixed/rfm69-library-for-raspbe...

Gets about 1.6 miles with basic wire antenna. More if you play with directional yagis or the like

The problem with LoRa is that yes you can get ten miles, assuming you chose the right antenna and radio, but you wont be able to transmit for very long.

I have a number of sensors that have RFM29 radios in them, and they run off solar and super caps. However they only transmit once a minute, and they don't stay on for a reply.

Power management is key at low power levels. To get ten years battery life, you either need massive batteries, or only transmit once every day/hour.

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#88

Post by jasonjs »

KaiserPro wrote: post #87

if anyone wants to play with LoRa you might want to play with the RFM 69 http://rdepablos.merlitec.com/mixed/rfm69-library-for-raspbe... Gets about 1.6 miles with basic wire antenna. More if you play with directional yagis or the like The problem with LoRa is that yes you can get ten miles, assuming you chose the right antenna and radio, but you wont be able to transmit for very long. I have a number of sensors that…

The RFM69 does not use LoRa, maybe you meant the RFM95W/96W?

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#89

Post by jlgaddis »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #49
th0ma5 wrote: post #2

Lower power, but highly processed radio signals are fascinating to me. I've been playing with WSPR on the 10 meter band which is fixing (hopefully) to open up a little here over the next couple of months. With about 1/10th of the power of my Wi-Fi router and a long wire over top of the house, I've been picked up so far this year in California from Ohio. Last year I was heard almost daily in Europe. A blogger I follow…

Ok, since there are some radio wizards in this thread: if I want to log low bandwidth sensor data (so < 1kbps) on a unidirectional (if that helps) link over ~ 500m, almost clean line-of-sight with some trees in there, what are my options? I'd prefer to spend little money and use little power on the sensor end. I'm considering an ESP8266 (so 802.11) with a high-gain directional antenna. Sender and receiver are fixed l…

I'm not sure what you mean by "little money" but for less than $100 per location, you could have a 100+ Mbps link using Ubiquiti NanoStations. You can use Wi-Fi or their proprietary protocol and the radios are available on 2.4, 3.65, and 5 GHz. These little things will cover your 500m link with ease but might very well be extreme overkill if all you really want is <= 1 Kbps throughput.
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