Intercontinental lorawan tracker

End Devices (Nodes) Hardware
1

A bit of an unconventional question…

Some ballooners have thrown up foil balloons with <20 gram payloads that circle the earth multiple times before EOL. This one circled the earth 3 times! http://www.leobodnar.com/balloons/B-66/index.html

These trackers must have the ability to change protocol/frequency based on its coordinates, and the ability to store and dump data when over the ocean.

I think LoraWAN is perfect for this, because of the chirp modulation.

I’ve thought about making a board with a RM191 and a RM186 because I have experience with them, but two microcontrollers is overkill. I think a better setup would be an RN4903, RN2483, and a microcontroller.

It looks like you can’t change regional frequencies on the RNXXXX without reflashing firmware. Is this true? If it is, are there any other modules with integrated LoraWAN stacks that could be used as an intercontinental tracker?

Thanks for your help!

1 Like
2

LoRaWAN coverage is far away from being worldwide yet. And roaming is in the pilot stage yet. This seems to be much more serious trouble.

Do you need downlinks?

3

Downlinks aren’t a must, but it would be nice to use some confirmed packets a few times a day to ensure transmission.

4

Are most of the balloons like the one you linked to, transmitting data in the 433 MHz spectrum? Since that band is relatively free worldwide it’s not like you’re dealing with frequency changes in that case. Also if you don’t need the full breadth of LoRaWAN you could just go ahead an use a 433 MHz LoRa module to test with in that case.

5

For why? If there’s no connection/coverage, how are you going to handle this situation?

Actually, you can implement a very basic subset of LoRaWAN protocol as a part of microcontroller firmware and use something like RFM96 attached to MCU. It seems that all you need is to send an unconfirmed uplink with the lowest datarate.