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New LoRa RF distance record

thethingsnetwork.org

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Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#11

Post by jacquesm »

boffinAudio wrote: post #3

Dang, so close to a truly 'lite figure for the record .. challenge accepted! I've had a plan to blanket my city (Vienna) with LoRa and create my own local Internet, wiring up only retro computers .. seems like its time to break out the ol' lunchboxes and get cracking.

That's a neat idea. The challenge will be to stop it from becoming a huge success because then you get all of the problems that are endemic on the normal internet as well. But that sounds like a very interesting and worthwhile project.

Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#12

Post by wienke »

martin_a wrote: post #6

Yeah... But WiFi doesn't work when I'm sitting on the toilet two rooms down the corridor. Crazy times. No, to be honest: Very impressive. It's kind of a "dream" of me, to bring Internet to the river/picknick area two kilometers away from me. LoRa would probably be the way to go, will have to look further into that.

For sure would be great but LoRa has limitations as it is designed for small sensors that sent very little data: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/limitations/

Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#13

Post by Tepix »

martin_a wrote: post #6

Yeah... But WiFi doesn't work when I'm sitting on the toilet two rooms down the corridor. Crazy times. No, to be honest: Very impressive. It's kind of a "dream" of me, to bring Internet to the river/picknick area two kilometers away from me. LoRa would probably be the way to go, will have to look further into that.

LoRa has pretty strict limits on how often you may use the frequency. That severely limits use cases. Browsing the internet is completely unfeasible.

Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#14

Post by wienke »

jacquesm wrote: post #11
boffinAudio wrote: post #3

Dang, so close to a truly 'lite figure for the record .. challenge accepted! I've had a plan to blanket my city (Vienna) with LoRa and create my own local Internet, wiring up only retro computers .. seems like its time to break out the ol' lunchboxes and get cracking.

That's a neat idea. The challenge will be to stop it from becoming a huge success because then you get all of the problems that are endemic on the normal internet as well. But that sounds like a very interesting and worthwhile project.

There are already 89 gateways in Vienna you can directly use. So nothing is holding you back :) https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/community/vienna/

Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#15

Post by johanstokking »

CTO & co-founder of The Things Network here! I've been working with LoRa for over eight years now, and I keep getting surprised by measurements like this. What started off as "line of sight works" went to a successful "LoRa moon bounce" [0] and now a sea level reception over 830 miles.

So, any physics people here care to comment how this works? Is this pure atmospheric refraction or is there something else?

[0] https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2021/first-lora-message-bounce...

Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#16

Post by ricardobeat »

How does this work?

At this distance you need a 130km-high tower for line of sight due to earth’s curvature. The previous record was set on a balloon flying at 38km height. LoRa uses high frequencies so shouldn’t benefit from the ground effect?

Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#17

Post by johanstokking »

goodpoint wrote: post #10

Nice, but don't forget that LoRa® LoRaWAN® and The Things Network® is all proprietary and patented stuff. The article is advertising.

This is not entirely accurate. LoRa is a patented RF technology owned by Semtech. LoRaWAN is a standard maintained by the LoRa Alliance (which is not very different from other standards and marketing bodies). The Things Network (founded by @wienke and myself) is a developer community around LoRaWAN and a free to use cloud service intended for R&D and non-commercial use cases.

Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#18

Post by Springtime »

martin_a wrote: post #6

Yeah... But WiFi doesn't work when I'm sitting on the toilet two rooms down the corridor. Crazy times. No, to be honest: Very impressive. It's kind of a "dream" of me, to bring Internet to the river/picknick area two kilometers away from me. LoRa would probably be the way to go, will have to look further into that.

From the relatively little I understand the lower the radio frequency the lower the bandwidth but more range it has/can pass through, while conversely the higher frequency the more bandwidth but shorter range/harder to penetrate obstacles (see eg: 5G). LoRa is the former and used for very low bandwidth applications, so not really suitable for browsing websites but has been used for for remote IoT stats, text messaging, etc.

(Fwiw I wasn't the one who downvoted but thought it'd be worth mentioning)

Re: New LoRa RF distance record

#19

Post by martin_a »

wienke wrote: post #12
martin_a wrote: post #6

Yeah... But WiFi doesn't work when I'm sitting on the toilet two rooms down the corridor. Crazy times. No, to be honest: Very impressive. It's kind of a "dream" of me, to bring Internet to the river/picknick area two kilometers away from me. LoRa would probably be the way to go, will have to look further into that.

For sure would be great but LoRa has limitations as it is designed for small sensors that sent very little data: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/limitations/

Ah, I see. Seems like directional antennas for WiFi would be what I need then.
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