I spoke to support staff today and they will have a look at the possibilities to mount the antenna parallel to the weather station with some offset.
Later this week the CMA calibration equipment should arrive, and once calibration is completed (may take another week since it’s holiday next week), we will place orders to convert the already existing boxes to the current version of hard- and software.
I’ll likely do a couple of tests regarding ABP while we’re waiting for the hardware to arrive, to see how far the TX power of the nodes will be able to get us.
Once the 60 boxes are built (will probably take a while), we will be able to do full coverage mapping. Might open a new thread around then; for now I have learned a lot of new stuff which I will definitely be passing on to my students. I thank you all a lot!
LoRa = Long Range which actually means Longer Penetration Than Most Other Radio Modulations but I think Semtech marketing kiboshed that phrase as being too clumsy = LPTMORM
So the Tx power either gets us up & down five floors of a high rise office, anywhere between 50m and 2km and some other randomly plucked out the air number for an urban setting - 50m at ground level when surrounded by tower blocks and the antenna is on the top of a tower block, 3.4km at either end of the strip at Las Vegas when you are crossing the road and temporarily have line of sight with the antenna on the top of Bellagio (although the uplinks never get to your integration, because what gets uplinked in Vegas, stays in Vegas), my “record” is 118km line of sight - the transmitter was at 31,000m, in the Netherlands (we got a crash course in why it’s not Holland last year) in rural areas that are as flat as Norfolk (the exact mirror image the other side of the channel but without trying to reclaim the land so hard), probably a good 10km or more but in rural Derbyshire aka The Peak District, when I lived there I could go from my house (on top of a hill) to another hill 10km easy, but not from the bakery on the village main street at the bottom of the hill due to the stone buildings - unless you stepped between a gap & bingo, line of sight, reception very easy.
Great learning experience but in that case need to order kits to build 100 + spares to fix another 10… “sorry Sir the soldering iron/wire cutters/hammer slipped…the legs just fell off…oh so that was pin 1…”
I definitely understand that but it’s quite hard to phrase something like ‘we will see what conditions are required for a reliable range of so many kilometers in this direction, that direction etc’…
That’s very optimistic xD I do NOT expect that even a third of my students will be able to pull off a working miracle in one go
It’s me plus four support staff that will be doing to job… so propably two full days of resoldering sensors and cutting a few additional holes plus reflashing software - not too bad. But kinda scary after sooo much time has been put into it!
but it’s quite hard to phrase something like ‘we will see what conditions are required for a reliable range of so many kilometers in this direction, that direction etc’…