10 ms·
New LoRa RF distance record
- naillo 3y agoThe things people are able to do these days with low rank approximation is crazy
- uoaei 3y agoThis has nothing to do with low-rank approximation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
- ur-whale 3y ago> This has nothing to do with low-rank approximation. Literal-minded people are an endless source of joy.
- uoaei 3y agoWith all the naive AI zealotry on HN can you really fault me? They're referring to this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685
- thelastparadise 3y agoPretty sure this is meant as a joke...
- Kamshak 3y agono jokes allowed on HN, sorry
- naillo 3y agoI'll be quiet and good
- sunbum 3y agoThere exists technology that ISN'T Ai...
- boffinAudio 3y agoDang, so close to a truly 'lite figure for the record .. challenge accepted! I've had a plan to blanket my city (Vienna) with LoRa and create my own local Internet, wiring up only retro computers .. seems like its time to break out the ol' lunchboxes and get cracking.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's a neat idea. The challenge will be to stop it from becoming a huge success because then you get all of the problems that are endemic on the normal internet as well. But that sounds like a very interesting and worthwhile project.
- wienke 3y agoThere are already 89 gateways in Vienna you can directly use. So nothing is holding you back :) https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/community/vienna/ https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/community/vienna/
- boffinAudio 3y agoThis is a truly awesome resource - thanks for sharing that! I'll be getting the retro computing crew, that is forming around our new exhibit at the Retro Gaming Museum, excited about this! Who knows, maybe we will have a retro- net up and running in the next few days ..
- wienke 3y agoGo for it! These communities are pretty active so you can also join one of their events.
- boffinAudio 3y agoDefinitely going to try to attend the next one .. thanks for the heads up!
- goodpoint 3y agoNice, but don't forget that LoRa® LoRaWAN® and The Things Network® is all proprietary and patented stuff. The article is advertising.
- johanstokking 3y agoThis is not entirely accurate. LoRa is a patented RF technology owned by Semtech. LoRaWAN is a standard maintained by the LoRa Alliance (which is not very different from other standards and marketing bodies). The Things Network (founded by @wienke and myself) is a developer community around LoRaWAN and a free to use cloud service intended for R&D and non-commercial use cases.
- catbert69 3y agoYou can get a LoRa transmitter/receiver for like $5 and setup your own network. Documentation and datasheets are freely available. They are really not printing money with that technology. There isn't any opensource modulation scheme that comes even close to LoRa.
- johanstokking 3y agoCTO & co-founder of The Things Network here! I've been working with LoRa for over eight years now, and I keep getting surprised by measurements like this. What started off as "line of sight works" went to a successful "LoRa moon bounce" [0] and now a sea level reception over 830 miles. So, any physics people here care to comment how this works? Is this pure atmospheric refraction or is there something else? [0] https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2021/first-lora-message-bounced-off-the-moon/ https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2021/first-lora-message-bounce...
- jacquesm 3y ago[flagged]
- SahAssar 3y agoPosting ones own content is not astroturfing unless they try to hide that it was them.
- paulsutter 3y agoJacques’ point is spot-on. What word would be more precise? shilling? spam? The word astroturfing seems fine to me
- SahAssar 3y agoIf the content is good and nobody is hiding their affiliation with it then the correct word is just "posting". Otherwise it might fit within one of the categories you mentioned. I agree that it would be better if they were up front with their affiliation, but hiding it (astroturfing) is not the same as not divulging.
- jacquesm 3y agoThe submitter is a low karma anonymous account that just so happens to match the last name of the CEO of the company, so it isn't disclosed. Also this shot up on the 'new' page suggesting more than one company vote, this isn't the first time this happens with that particular domain either. Similar stuff is happening on Wikipedia, read the talk page there (and the LoRa page) to see what I'm getting at.
- ricardobeat 3y agoHow does this work? At this distance you need a 130km-high tower for line of sight due to earth’s curvature. The previous record was set on a balloon flying at 38km height. LoRa uses high frequencies so shouldn’t benefit from the ground effect?
- MrOxiMoron 3y agoprobably the same amateur radio people can connect to people halfway across the globe; bouncing off an atmospheric layer.
- catbert69 3y agoThat doesn't work well on 433MHz oder 868MHz. Ionosphere reflection stuff usually happens <30MHz. On VHF/UHF it's usually atmospheric ducting where radio signals are getting reflected between two layers of air.
- catbert69 3y ago99% this was atmospheric ducting. Also LoRa is an incredibly robust modulation.
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's a one-off, you won't be able to achieve this with any degree of reliability in practice, but it's a nice milestone achievement.
- martin_a 3y agoYeah... But WiFi doesn't work when I'm sitting on the toilet two rooms down the corridor. Crazy times. No, to be honest: Very impressive. It's kind of a "dream" of me, to bring Internet to the river/picknick area two kilometers away from me. LoRa would probably be the way to go, will have to look further into that.
- wienke 3y agoFor sure would be great but LoRa has limitations as it is designed for small sensors that sent very little data: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/limitations/ https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/limitations/
- martin_a 3y agoAh, I see. Seems like directional antennas for WiFi would be what I need then.
- rcarmo 3y agoYes. 2.4GHz ones will do fine (and better than 5GHz for that range).
- Svenstaro 3y agoYou're looking LoRaWan which is not the same as LoRa. In fact I believe web browsing to be quite feasible if you just use LoRa with your own network stack.
- wienke 3y agoHow would that exactly work?
- Svenstaro 3y agoI did this once as a small experiment. Basically use a small TCP stack with LoRa as layer 1 and then expose the whole thing as a Linux kernel module. It was a bit shitty but it seemed promising. For some reason, I don't find LoRaWan at all alluring. As far as I can tell, in the end it's in the hands of one company and that really defeats the spirit for me. I mostly just use LoRa for point-to-point connections with my own shitty networking stack.
- flxh1 3y agoWow, why do you think this was more effective than the weather balloon? Does the water have such an impact in the signal?
- chronicsonic 3y agoCool! I had a tour a few months ago at this Telescope in Dwingeloo. Highly recommended, was amazing to hear the live sound of a pulsar (in the Crab Nebula).
- wienke 3y agoIf you want to know more Thomas Telkamp used that Telescope for a nice experiment and bounced a LoRa message on the moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIdCzvLWCEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIdCzvLWCEc
- Phelinofist 3y agoNice that the title contains both, km and mi
- ur-whale 3y agoA good explanation of LoRa, and in particular of the "link budget" idea which makes LoRa different from other wireless tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOwbNUpDQA&list=PL3XBzmAj53Rkkogh-lti58h_GkhzU1n7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOwbNUpDQA&list=PL3XBzmAj53...
- stavros 3y agoIn the last few years, the RC market (drones, airplanes, etc) has shifted to LoRa for the control link. A tiny, battery-powered transmitter/receiver pair lets me go 50km easily, which is just amazing. ExpressLRS has taken everything by storm, partly because it's a well-governed open source project, and it manages to innovate many times faster than the old companies manage to fix bugs in their own products.
- nickcw 3y agoLoRa runs in the 868 MHz band (in Europe) - a frequency range known for being line of sight only as the ionosphere doesn't reflect radio waves of that high frequency. However sometimes you can get Troposheric propagation on these high frequency bands. This used to be common when I was a teenager living in the south of England in Kent and we could occasionally receive racy TV channels from Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation From wikipedia: > Tropospheric propagated signals travel in the part of the atmosphere adjacent to the surface and extending to some 25,000 feet (8 km). Such signals are thus directly affected by weather conditions extending over some hundreds of miles. During very settled, warm anticyclonic weather (i.e., high pressure), usually weak signals from distant transmitters improve in strength. Radio Amateurs love this kind of propagation. It is very variable, doesn't last long, but can give you contacts over great distances on frequencies which are usually line of sight. I think the record for radio amateurs on the 70 cm band (430-440 MHz) is over 4,500 km!
- dbrgn 3y agoCould the signal bounce off airplanes as well, or is that effect not relevant in practice? (I think I've heard such stories before from radio amateurs...)
- H8crilA 3y agoIt can bounce off of meteor trails or the moon. It's been done many times in the ham community. Signals do bounce off of aircraft too, there are even passive military radars that track airborne objects using DVB-T or other strong signal reflections. It could be used if the conditions are just right. All of this has really nothing to do with LoRa and everything to do with physical properties of the emissions (frequency, power, polarization) and physical properties of whatever happens to exist in the world at the time.
- dbrgn 3y agoYes, of course this is related to the physical properties of the emissions, but LoRa uses specific frequencies of the ISM band (868 MHz in Europe), and this discussion was about the reasons why that specific LoRa transmission worked even though there wasn't a line of sight. Airplanes could be an explanation, although your sibling comment thinks there isn't sufficient transmission power for it to be feasible.
- mk_stjames 3y agoThere is never any mention of bitrate when talking about LoRa. It's infuriating from someone on the outside. From what I gather, the map says a "SF:12" which means a spread factor of 12, at a bandwidth of 125khz. With a code rate of '1' according to https://www.rfwireless-world.com/calculators/LoRa-Data-Rate-Calculator.html https://www.rfwireless-world.com/calculators/LoRa-Data-Rate-... this means about 292 bits-per-second transmission rate for the packet. But I'm unsure if this is correct. How hard would it have been to put that in the post? I feel like there is some conspiracy to never talk about bitrates/transfer rates in the LoRa world. Like, ever. Just say it. It helps people understand what this tech is for.
- wienke 3y agoGood point. We'll add that to the next post if there is a new record. Also what can be confusing is that the business viable part is even much smaller than the technical viable part. The low power operations is really only at lower SF7 or SF8. And we push our partners and ecosystem to keep the payload as small as possible as every byte counts. It is a completely different way of thinking than WiFi or cellular. Yet I do agree it is presented with the same terms and paradigm and that is confusing.
- femto 3y ago> It is a completely different way of thinking... On that point, have you looked at Myriota's research? (https://myriota.com/ https://myriota.com/) In developing their system they went right back to the fundamentals and reworked everything around the idea of short messages. For example, an implicit assumption in the Shannon bound is that the message length is long, so they figured out that their short message system doesn't obey the Shannon bound and designed the coding and so on accordingly. It's fascinating stuff if you're into information theory.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoYou can do a lot with 292 bits per second if you use it well.
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- Aachen 3y agoAre we sure it wasn't one more kilometer? Has it been rounded correctly? Curvature of the earth taken into account?
- albertzeyer 3y agoSo I know LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models and Using LoRA for Efficient Stable Diffusion Fine-Tuning. But from the text, I don't think this is about it? It seems it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
- dopidopHN 3y agoCorrect. It’s a low bandwidth/ long distance RF protocol over specifics bands. It’s also kinda proprietary.
- KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 3y agocheck out ham radio WSPR for an indication of the sorts of things that can be done
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoWSPR is very different than LoRa. WSPR is usually used at HF, and has very low bandwidth. LoRa is used at UHF frequencies, and has very wide bandwidth, as it's a spread spectrum modulation scheme. There's more differences but those are the ones relevant to this discussion.
- westmeal 3y agoNot super familiar with LoRa, can you explain what makes it properietary? Is it the protocol?
- jacquesm 3y agoThey've taken out a bunch of patents for instance: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160094269A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160094269A1/en
- knorker 3y agoThat's right. Microsoft must have used Bing to see if the name was taken, and got no results, when they named their thing LoRA.
- wienke 3y agoWhy did the moderator remove the distance? That is like the main fun message.
- jschveibinz 3y agoMore ideas to read about: 1. How to increase range: https://community.emlid.com/t/increasing-lora-s-range/32597 https://community.emlid.com/t/increasing-lora-s-range/32597 2. LoRA repeater: https://hackaday.com/2019/05/02/simple-self-contained-lora-repeater-in-about-an-hour/ https://hackaday.com/2019/05/02/simple-self-contained-lora-r... 3. High altitude LoRA receive-transmit: https://www.daveakerman.com/?p=2828 https://www.daveakerman.com/?p=2828
- sjkoelle 3y agoDamn this wasn't the LoRa I was thinking of
- glonq 3y ago1336km is ridiculous! I was more than satisfied to get 1% of that range on my last LoRaWAN project.