On 5/3/2022 8:15 PM, Jon Adams wrote:
I do not believe you can use Direwolf as an APRS client for a
standalone
KISS TNC.
I have experimented with LoRa myself, at one point I actually ran
APRS in the field.
My client radio was a SparkX Pro RF 1W board running homegrown KISS
firmware
on the SAMD21 MCU. Pretty sure I was running APRX in a odroid C1 for
the APRS part.
At home - only about 80' above sea level but looking across flat
marshland to one
direction - I had a Larsen 5dBi groundplane hanging in an upstairs
window with a
Feather 32U4 LoRa hanging on the antenna pigtail, also running
custom KISS firmware
to, IIRC, APRS-IS but I can't remember for sure.
Antenna on the car was a little mag mount of dubious gain.
Nonetheless I tracked
out across marshland a good 7-8 miles. Later tests, not using APRS,
with the same radios
saw reliable coverage 40km across flat land to a bridge about 200'
above sea level.
These tests were generally done with BW 125kHz and SF 7 or 8 IIRC.
I'll have to dig
up the experimental code at some point. I did specifically avoid the
LoRaWAN channels
here in US915; we do have pervasive SmartMeters, a mesh network on
915MHz
running 1W with short data packets (despite being short, the density
of meters in
neighborhood means you frequently see pings on the waterfall).
Since then I've had multiple LoRaWAN gateways installed on hilltop
sites for
actual LoRaWAN operation, and, with good LoS paths, see 15km+ paths
to
fixed barefoot (+20dBm max) devices (motes) in the field, using
2-5dBi antennas.
LoRaWAN's Adaptive Data Rate generally reduces transmit power in the
field motes
to +10dBm.
You might be interested in Dan Fay KG5VBY research with higher-power
LoRa:
73,
Dana? K6JQ
