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
I bought a pair of 900MHz 100mW LoRa modems for $20 off of tindie and wired them straight to the SPI port on a Raspberry Pi. I wrote a driver and have them tx/rx-ing simple test payloads. No range tests yet, still working at the bench. I would like to make a simplified (802.15.4 + RPL)-like protocol for them to do multi-hop IPv6 with a data rate around 10kbps. The downside is that the radios do NOT have good timing control, so automated TDMA may need huge (milliseconds!) margins. The radios also have very tolerant signal detection, so CRC checking is a must unless you want to wade through garbage data.
!!Dean KC4KSU
On Nov 27, 2016, at 4:59 AM, Rob Janssen wrote:
(Please trim inclusions from previous messages) _______________________________________________
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
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Rob Janssen