Like the author mentioned, these are new-ish/emerging standards and there isn't a de-facto board like Arduino just yet. Therefore it's kind of hard to recommen

Like the author mentioned, these are new-ish/emerging standards and there isn't a de-facto board like Arduino just yet. Therefore it's kind of hard to recommend a board that I know has a ton of documentation and a big community. However, if you are the adventurous type and don't mind working with unpolished libraries and figuring things out from function descriptions, there are tons of smaller people putting out boards on Tindie: https://www.tindie.com/ https://www.tindie.com/ Tindie has a few LoRa boards, some with built in antennas and some without: https://www.tindie.com/products/DORJI_COM/long-range-semtech-lora-sx1276-sx1278-data-radio-modem-drf1278dm/?pt=full_prod_search https://www.tindie.com/products/DORJI_COM/long-range-semtech... But bottom line is that this tech isn't (yet) popular enough to try without getting a little dirty. If you can afford a bigger battery, try 900 MHz Xbee transmitters for an easy to interface serial with long range.