Ham Radio LoRa Experiments

Project Mission

Enable the use of inexpensive microcontroller and LoRa hardware for ARPS tracking, telemetry, and other low data rate data communications for amateur radio operators.

LoRa hardware which functions on the 70cm amateur band can be sourced from amazon, ebay, and other suppliers. This is manufactured for use on the EU433 ISM band in ITU Region . These frequencies are available for use by licensed ham radio operators in North America.

You can get a 100mW radio module for only about $10 and integrated microcontrollers with a radio for abot twice that. The hardware I use is linked below. Code for the hardware will be made available "soon" once I add some comments and clean it up.

The first question anyone should ask is "Why do something new?" You could run LoRaWAN, or even AX.25 over the LoRA hardware. That is certainly true, but the stated purposes of this experiment don't require the extended capabilities of either of those protocols. The closest model would be APRS, which uses the minimal amount of AX.25 possible still must include elements that incur additional power consumption (ie: the non-empty "destination" address and printable ASCII encoding for all transmitted data.)

There have been several methods of using LoRa hardware on small microcontrollers which forgo any of these higher level protocols. I felt that a design of that kind best fit the needs of a system meant purely for tracking and telemetry. Thus the protocol I'm working with strips everything that is not necessary out of the required data stream and instead supports extensions to add features back in as needed at the cost of more transmit time and higher power consumption.