27 Nov
2016
27 Nov
'16
5:59 p.m.
Since we really need some other data radio options in
the hobby, I
wanted to mention LoRa.
It's a chirped spread spectrum technology used for
low power WAN
applications, with air transfer rates: 300bps-31.2Kbps. There are 433
MHz modules, as well as 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz.
Indeed it is interesting, I have looked at it as well when a local telecom
company recently announced it has deployed a country-covering network.
(by mounting LoRa equipment at all cell towers and locations)
They use 900 MHz, which is not a ham band here. But 433 could be useful.
It is unfortunate that the datarate is too low for many applications.
It could be interesting for APRS-like mobile datacomm or other telemetry,
which is also what the commercial network is for.
Rob