Oddbean

I would like to see for example higher power LoRa in ham frequencies. The ham radios dead thing is at "punks not dead" kinda trope. More people should be experimenting with radio, if it'd called ham or not I don't really care. It's all waves to me.

I love LoRa it's was one of my first large embedded project because most oss LoRa software (especially firmware) is poorly implemented/maintained. It ended up leading me to rewrite the BMC SPI driver for rasbian to finish the //TODO section and the other comment saying //Untested, might work... in prod That said, lora is great, it's just very low bandwidth and high overhead, which is by design, but you can't really implement a working network stack and get good distance. I think the fastest I could transmit with "full duplex" enabled was like 2kb/sec at like 2000ft iirc. I ended up just coming up with a scheme to negotiate send/receive times so each radio could properly operate in full duplex mode. That and radiohead software just wouldn't compile I ended up rewriting it all. I guess some people have figured out how to operate the lora protocol with better radios and tech stacks, but it's a pretty big limitation considering we have FSK and OSK? radios with much better performance on much older and powerful technology?

Yeah, it's popular because it's a hack on the legal system. It's not the best system. A hack, because of the power requirements it can legally operate in the unlicensed bands. It is working and interesting however. There are even I think successes in "mission critical" use. A long wire and a paddle can communicate across the world for example, lora can't touch that. It's also a relatively cheap gadget, with proprietary transmitters that must be licensed from Semtech. And cheap electronic toys can sold, pitched, and enjoyed. So I have a complicated relationship with LoRa. I can appreciate it's nerd factor, but at the same time, I recognize the cool software being built with it, but I do cringe a bit when people say that this proprietary modem is "freedom tech." But you are reading this most likely on a proprietary computer from Intel, amd, or apple so maybe I'm being too harsh.

What does everyone think about LoRaWAN? Specifically in it's use with TTN (the things network), which I recognize is really more focused on embedded sensors with super low power draw and sleep? The use case from meshtastic feels a bit different, is anyone using TTN/LoRaWAN parallel to meshtastic or even is there any cross over? Re the higher power LoRa maybe using a high gain multi element directional antenna might get some more distance but I haven't looked up the ERP rules for the 900MHz ISM band, so you might have to use the licensed amateur allocation, not sure.

The issue with LoRaWAN is that it's an IoT thing like you say that is meant for connected sensors with the help of the Internet. It has actually a neat encryption system where there are network keys and app keys such that apps need not be tied to networks. But it's really designed for an operator with a larger sensor network. That and the corporate feel properly scared people off. It's been going strong for over 10 years though I think.