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of all the things to bounce off the moon, why a consumer IoT protocol? Alien 1: The humans are talking again. Alien 2: What did they say? Alien 1: The front do
by jmole 5y ago
of all the things to bounce off the moon, why a consumer IoT protocol?
Alien 1: The humans are talking again.
Alien 2: What did they say?
Alien 1: The front door is locked.
- mcpherrinm 5y agoAmateur radio operators routinely do earth-moon-earth radio communication using specifically designed protocols. So using LoRa here is surely the point: to show what it can do — not that it can be done at all.
- giantg2 5y agoA consumer protocol, but also way over consumer power level (350W). No wonder it's the furthest LoRa message sent. Let's bump it up to 1kW and break the record again...
- numlock86 5y ago1kW? Are you crazy??? Let's see 25mW, which is the maximum you are allowed to use in Germany for 868 MHz ...
- imoverclocked 5y agoI agree, if we are doing this, go big. 1MW would be far more exciting and the experiment definitely wouldn't go unnoticed.
- stavros 5y agoTo be fair, it can do a few km at 25 mW, which is fairly good for consumer range.
- fortran77 5y agoThat was the Effective Radiated Power. The actual transmitter was outputting consumer output levels.
- jjoonathan 5y agoBecause it doubles the range of the PR stunt. If they had driven the chip with a raspberry pi (or, more importantly, said so enough times to land the keyword in the article), they could have quadrupled the range of the PR stunt.
- tinus_hn 5y agoThey could use virtual reality nanotechnology in the blockchain!
- Breefield 5y agoJust a guess: given that LoRa operates on line of sight, when trying to update a gateways with sensor status (e.g. GPS position of tracked item) the operator won't be able to get realtime reports if the gateway isn't positioned at a high enough altitude relative to the sensor. You can mitigate this by having many gateway/collectors at high points on buildings/hills, but bouncing signals off the moon seems like an interesting alternative for connectivity in low coverage locations... Perhaps this is clear to you I'm just trying to think it through out loud.
- detaro 5y agoMoonbounce isn't practical for any real application nowadays. It's a fun experiment and a PR stunt.
- Breefield 5y agoWhy isn't it practical? Background noise makes it unreliable?
- virtue3 5y agoBecause the moon is 238,900 mi away. Nor does it stay locked in position. Nor is it perfectly reflective (albeit quite a high albedo) nor a perfect sphere.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bigiain 5y agoThis comment has made me need to go listen to Albedo 0.39 again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygcBT87K6BY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygcBT87K6BY
- detaro 5y agoThe fact they used a 35m radio telescope as the receiver station here, and transmission powers way over legal limits for normal LoRa-like applications is a pretty good hint. You lose a crazy amount of signal with moonbounce, the effort is always easier to put into different methods instead. AFAIK it's only non-experimental use predates human-made satellites (US military, as a further channel to reach far-away war ships even if terrestrial propagation conditions are bad). If you can't use satellites, and can't have a receiver station within a few thousand miles of your transmitter, then it maybe is sort-of an option, but that's not really a situation you have anymore. Amateur radio operators still do it, and with purpose-made codecs and really slow speeds it's not that out of reach (i.e. at least for those you don't need a radio telescope dish), but that's just because it's an interesting challenge.
- axegon_ 5y agoI think this is a pretty good thing, certainly promising: IoT protocols are by definition accessible to the general public which gives a lot of potential for future developments. Surely not with LoRa in particular, given the microscopical size of the payloads but the fact that it is possible is really promising. Just a decade ago, this would have been unthinkable for any hobbyist. Hell, even the prices of sdr's a decade ago were off the charts and today a semi-decent one to get you started costs a few bucks.
- noman-land 5y agoI think it would be extremely neat to have a fully citizen run global p2p infrastructure that is nearly free, resilient to electrical and internet outages, and able to reach remote and distant places.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoI'd crowdfund the maintenance of LoRa repeaters on nearby mountaintops. I'd also do the hiking to maintain them, sounds like as good a premise for adventure as any.
- genewitch 5y agoWinlink basically does this. I'm unsure if there's software for other OS, but winlink is email-ish that is p2p on the backend, and can also be used point to point. And don't tell anyone I said this, but if you have a real hardware modem for winlink you can get 3KB/second. It works on any frequency you can tune to. Also APRS, even though it seems like Google has a huge interest in it, is also a p2p communication network, running on 144mhz and 10mhz.
- URSpider94 5y agoCheck out https://helium.com https://helium.com - it's a blockchain-based LoRA network, where the blockchain is used to reward uptime and certainty of location of the base stations. Transmissions can be received from 10 miles or more away, if the receiver is located high enough.
- progre 5y agoThat would be neat! But before anyone thinks they can build a citizen p2p version of internet this way: LoRa can do bits per minute. Think old time telegraph throghput.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- grkvlt 5y agoSo, something like AX.25 [0][1] on the amateur radio VHF and UHF bands, which is free (once you have an appropriate license) and there is widespread citizen maintained and managed infrastructure, such as repeaters. [2] 0. http://www.ax25.net/ http://www.ax25.net/ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AX.25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AX.25 2. https://ukrepeater.net/ https://ukrepeater.net/
- gh02t 5y agoLoRa isn't really a consumer protocol, more of an industrial one. It's mostly intended for widely distributed sensor networks.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoI think Amazon Sidewalk (included w/ every Alexa now) is built on top of LoRa
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoIt looks like they added LoRa to the most recent Ring Bridge[1], but most older Sidewalk devices do their connecting over wifi. Seems likely other new ones will do both. 1: https://fccid.io/2AEUPBHARB001/RF-Exposure-Info/RF-Exposure-FCC-4959695 https://fccid.io/2AEUPBHARB001/RF-Exposure-Info/RF-Exposure-...
- intpx 5y agoWasn't it designed for sending sensor data from oil wells spread out over vast swaths of land or something? I've always though of it as shortwave/vhf for packets
- intpx 5y agoMaybe i'm thinking zigbee?
- gh02t 5y agoZigbee has always (or at least, for a long time) targeted a mixture of consumer and industrial applications and is focused on relatively short range mesh networks. It does have a lot of consumer uses now, it's one of the big protocols used for home automation. Not sure of the exact history of LoRa, but widely distributed oil well sensors would definitely fit the intended use of LoRa. Agriculture is another good use case. Low power sensors infrequently reporting (mostly one-way) small amounts of data back to a base station over really long distances is what it was originally designed for, though people have done other stuff with it. Zigbee is all about the meshing AFAIU.
- ineedasername 5y agoAlien 3: We need to find this Alexa person
- walrus01 5y agolora is used for more than just consumer iot control - it's one of the most effective ways to bridge a serial connection across a very low bandwidth/RF difficult or weak link.
- bigiain 5y agoThe spread spectrum "chirps" that LoRa uses are really effective in allowing you to grab tiny signals from unreasonably large noise floors. You can see the really obvious signal in the waterfall chart here: https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora https://revspace.nl/DecodingLora It's way way easier to grab those chirps out of the noise than FSK FM modulated signals or worse AM anything.