Poor range with Lopy4 on Lorawan

Support
1

I have a lopy4 device that sends data to TTN (gateway is a Mikrotik Lorawan gateway with 6.5dbi antenna mounted on roof) and despite the advertised optimum range of ~20km I am having a hard time getting even a few kilometers.

The devices are in flat farmland (see https://goo.gl/maps/r1uA5Xe8vZqKY3UE9 for an example) so I’m very surprised to be having issues.

When the device boots it joins the Lorawan network using OTAA and at distances over a few hundred meters it can’t even join the network! Full code is at https://gist.github.com/hilt86/b21d8d6d6491416e71043bfd0db8759a

Here are some questions :

  • What can I do to improve the range?
  • Should I be using the AU923 instead of AU915?
  • What effect does choice of TTN router have?

I’d very much appreciate any advice I can get!

H

2

Could anyone from Core staff help please @staff?

3

Hey Hilton,

Sorry about the long delay on this one, I’ve done some research on the Lopy4 and its specifications/use within Australia (Here’s a link to the Things Network)

  • That’s an interesting issue, so your device is fully functional within the shorter range? As always LOS is the way to go, but by the looks of it there should be plenty, optimising your antennas to be directional may be a good move to increase range, but it shouldn’t be that low.

  • You could use that standard instead, but either should be providing sufficient communication between devices such as in your project.

  • The short answer, is not much. The long answer is that the differences in specifications, performance, capacity, etc, will change the way that your devices interact with the network (which changes depending on their application/s) if you’re curious about how they interact from a network engineering point of view I’d highly recommend reading the info on the site below.

If there’s anything else that we can do for you please let us know and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Bryce
Core Electronics | Support