Lopy-Lopy Communication Distance is too short !!!

[danielm]

I have gateway - sensor system based on LoPy. Until yesterday I was using releases from february. Yesterday I performed upgrade of both gateway and sensor and to my surprise LoRa message (16 Bytes) made it to the gateway only rarely. So I started downgrading the firmware incrementaly and found out that last release on which the communication works well is 1.6.3.b1. Not sure what is happening, will do more testing today.

[danielm]

So in the end it seems that if both sensor and gateway are on releases up to 1.6.3.b1 or 1.6.4b1 and newer the communication works well. I am now running both on 1.6.7.b1.

In 1.6.4.b1 following change was implemented:
esp32: Enable all spreading factors and bandwidths supported by the SX1272.
Maybe this is the reason for incompatibility between some (different) versions.

[mkharibalaji]

@jmarcelino
I tried all the frequencies that you suggested but nothing worked out.

@danielm
That's interesting !. What is the distance between your lopy gateway and sensor that your able to send/recieve data ?

[danielm]

@mkharibalaji
I did not test maximum distance yet, but it was able to send data through 6 concrete floors.
Before I tried LoRaWAN mode and connected to community network gateway over 5km away.

[Clemens]

I used a pair of LoPys with the "LoRa/Sigfox Antennen-Kit" http://www.exp-tech.de/lora-sigfox-antenna-kit . and frequency=868000000, tx_power=14, bandwidth=LoRa.BW_125KHZ, sf=7 I reached around 450 m in the same street without line-of-sight. I think you will get no more distance with obstacles in between.

[constantinos]

@mkharibalaji please check params

You may find the following useful

Mode of LoRa
medium range: bandwidth=LoRa.BW_250KHZ,coding_rate=LoRa.CODING_4_5,sf=7
fast short range: bandwidth=LoRa.BW_500KHZ,coding_rate=LoRa.CODING_4_5,sf=7
slow long range: bandwidth=LoRa.BW_125KHZ,coding_rate=LoRa.CODING_4_8,sf=9
very slow long range: bandwidth=LoRa.BW_125KHZ,coding_rate=LoRa.CODING_4_8,sf=12

[mkharibalaji]

@constantinos
I have already tried the configurations - nothing fruitful.

@Clemens
Range depends on the kind of inteference you have in your street,I have literally 3 different companies cell phone towers within 1 KM range around my area and this is quite obvious in most of the cities in India.
I tested it in a straight road with minimal interferences and able to get it around 400m.
But if we are to use it in a Metro/Cosmo Politan citiy with high interference, then we need to place the base station/reciever with multi channel in a high raise building with a good Antenna covering a range around 3 miles
Now the Challenge is whether the same Lora Chip with single Channel Gateway (Lopy) is capable of doing atleast the minimal coverage is what i am testing.
From the test,my simple inference is that Lora really works well in remote areas where there is little or no interference,so i dropped the asset tracking usecase of Lopy-Lopy where i am much disappointed.

[avinash]

@mkharibalaji Did you pursue your car tracking idea further?

[titi974]

Here in Paris on a very crowded street today (Champs-Elysées), we managed to get 300 meters.

[titi974]

@titi974 so last test was with sf7, we did it again with sf12 and managed to get 550 meters this time.