Hi All,
Just looking for some information regarding LoRaWAN transmission distance records.
I know that the world record is 832Km using 25mW.
Is there an Australia, Oceania, or Asia Pacific distance record?
What’s the process to have a record verified?
Regards,
Liam
What’s your goal? Unless you’re dealing with spacecraft or at least aircraft or mountain peaks, none of that has any practical meaning.
In typical terrestrial usage, you’re either limited by built obstructions, terrain, curvature of the earth, or interference.
The purpose of my question relates more to verification of the distance record.
I have launched a LoRaWAN payload from a High Altitude Balloon and are wanting to know what the distance records are.
The problem, as I see it, is that having an ‘official’ record verification process is that there will be launches of balloons, for the sole purpose of breaking records.
It does need to be remembered how much traffic in the TTN backend these ‘record attempts’ can generate, a flight in a EU country can result in most Gateways in the EU receiving the packets.
Knowing the ERP of a transmitter and the sensitivity of the receiver you can calculate the “record”-distance.
For the Semtech chipset afaik you have abt. 300km at SF7 and 1300km at SF12.
btw: my personal record with SF7 is 218km - between a node and a gateway both on the ground. The phenomena that led to this distance is called “duct”.
You do need to know the level of RF noise the receiver is actually exposed too. In the many long distance tests I have done for both FSK and LoRa ISM modules, I have never got even close to the data sheet sensitivity.
Unless you start fabricating logs which no one will know the difference or want to inspect anyway, why not just say where your balloon was and where the furthest away gateway was and be done with it.
As eluded to above, this isn’t a desirable activity “just because” - if you have some serious science going on and happen to get a considerable distance, then fine, but otherwise, stick to P2P for your distance records.
I speak as a fellow HABer, so I know the fun of getting a good altitude and a good link back to a far away receiver, but I’m not up for spamming the entire of the UK’s gateways just to see if I can.
Fixed that for you - its amazing just how many GW’s get hit during these flights and Stuarts comments above wrt TTN impact quite right. Hvve seen historic cases of old Nottingham GW being pinged by Baloons off UK Thames Estuary & East Coast/south North Sea some 230-270km away at same time as a number of my Thames Valley & Soouth Bucks GW’s. The latter often hit by balloons over Belgium and The Netherlands - 220-300+km distant - and I assume most other reasonably sighted GWs under same coverage area also being hit…thats many hundreds if not many thousands of GW’s - each passing the same message to TTN back.end! Thats a massive traffic spike from usual ~350-390messages/sec (386/sec when I checked 10 mins ago) currently being handled via V2 GW’s globally! (And not including contribution from 500+V3 GW’s) - just for a radius of average perhaps 200-300km.
Remember this was conducted in Australia, we are a bit more spread out down here. The balloon was launched north of Adelaide, about a 2 hour drive. To our East, the nearest major population centre is about 800 Km away. (Yep, that’s right 800Km) There are a few gateways between, but not that many.
Also, the people involved are professional RF engineers etc and understand propagation etc. I would go as far to say the Lora node was not the primary payload, think you will find it was other RF packages. For example I was able to watch real-time video streamed to YouTube from the balloon during its flight.
This forum is read world wide, we have to set expectations for the whole world …
Most of the HAB launches I have been involved with are using 4FSK and RTTY on 70cm (434MHz) amateur band. We are mostly using recycled/reprogrammed RS41 radiosondes.
Last Sunday March 7 we launched our usual payloads plus 2 experimental payloads. DVB-S live video feed and a RAK5205 LoRaWAN with custom firmware for HAB GPS and TTN packet limit.
We were surprised with
the LoRaWAN payload which was received up to 585Km away.
However we have nothing to benchmark this against other than the world record of 832Km. Hence my interest in finding out whether this is any good or not.
All understood.
Do you understand why we don’t want to encourage this as a primary activity??
Which is why as a community we should be reluctant to start some sort of arms race / leader board.
Be happy with a big number. Mine is 118km P2P from a pigtail at 1230,000’ over Corby back home to the High Peak on a car mag mount aerial, so you can score yours as a win. But please …