Hi everyone,
I am quite new to LoRa and I’d like to jump in straight by creating a small test network made of one gateway and some repeater nodes. I live in a rural area and got a permit to temporarily increase the output power in the 433MHz band up to 2W, while keeping restrictions about duty cycle.
For the repeater nodes I was looking at the ebyte modules but there are so many to choose from that things get complicated.
I excluded the E32 as it uses the older SX1278 module while the E22 mounts the newer SX1268 . I prefer the UART version as it’s more suited for protoboards but the SPI version claims to use a special LoRaTM modulation method able to increase its range of 4km when compared to the UART one.
How is it possible?
I’d use them as nodes, running off a small solar panel. I’m testing an image compression algorithm in order to transmit real time delayed photo captures for fauna monitoring.
For the gateway, it’s a Raspberry Pi with a iMST iC880a concentrator board.
(Replying to the other post here) The E62 specifications page clearly states it is a full duplex module. It seems ebyte is quite a reputable seller.
From the manual
Module E62-433T30D is a full-duplex wireless transceiver module with TTL level output, operates at 425-450MHz (default: 433MHz) […]
Features TDD (Time Division Duplex). User can transmit data while receiving, not have to wait for the end of receiving
Rebutable maybe, but thats very misleading, deliberatly so I suspect. The UART front end only gives the impression of ‘full duplex’ since the UART processor will be buffering.
Full duplex LoRa it is not.
But not relavent to the forum as you cannot use them for TTN.
To work with TTN you require control over LoRa parameters such as bandwidth, spreading factor, code rate, syncword, IQ. You dont have that level of control with the Ebyte UART front end modules.
There is no channel plan in TTN for 433MHz so you wouldn’t be able to use TTN. Also the iC880a is a 868MHz concentrator according to iMST documentation so you are mixing incompatible technologies.
I’m not going into the lorawan compatibility of the modules as that has been discussed already.
And where in the documentation does it say the serial modules are configurable for LoRaWAN operation? Because that is what you need for TTN.
But you don’t have to accept our help, feel free to buy the hardware and try for yourself. May-be we’re overlooking something. However if it doesn’t work or you are stuck getting it to work you are on your own as we don’t know how to get it going.
If you are buying, make sure to buy components with matching frequencies. And if you want to use TTN check the available channel plans in the console before deciding on a frequency.
@Anelito I think you will be better off using good antennas and select a high location for your gateway antenna vs using higher power. I only do rural installations, and 10 miles is definitely possible. Using LoRaWAN will avoid issues with "simple " LoRa networks such as collisions and data corruption. Good luck.