My plans with LoRaWAN

Author:       -fab- <fab@redterminal.org>
License:      CC BY-SA 4.0
Published on: Wed, 12 Jun 2024 08:36:33 +0200
Last updated: Wed, 12 Jun 2024 08:36:33 +0200

My last post was a while ago. That's typical to me. I work on my projects and then I take a long timeout of my tech activities.

Now I'm planning a new project which has been brewing in my brain for some time. It was a thought of how to participate with the ROOPHLOCH event for the first time. I want to send my ROOPHLOCH post over LoRaWAN.

Sending messages with LoRaWAN

Lark made a post about his experiments with the Meshtastic Protocol which also uses LoRa.

Exploring Meshtastic

I didn't do much research on the Meshtastic Network, but my choice would be "The Things Network" where I read something about. There is only one node in the next big city of my location which is ~10km far away. And my location is not that ideal but I think I can get around 3-4 km.

The Things Network (https)

My plan is to set up a complete node and send my ROOPHLOCH post from as far away from the station as possible. But the rest of the time I want to provide LoRaWAN access to the neighborhood. The local setup on my balcony would be an 8-channel node.

Restrictions

But there seem to be some difficulties with LoRa/LoRaWAN in Germany. The bandwidth is between 350b/s and 11kb. That wouldn't be a problem for a short gemini post but unfortunately there seem to be further legal restrictions in Germany. As far as I understood you could only use 1% of the time sending messages. So that means I can only send one second every 100 seconds. That seems to be a BIG hurdle for my usecase.

But I'm not completely sure about that, so if you have any information about this situation *please* contact me and give advice. You can contact me with email <fab@redterminal.org> or with fedi @fab@pleroma.envs.net.

Any help with this would be highly appreciated.

All in all - Have fun!

-fab-

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