LoRa / Meshtastic frequencies

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I'm considering getting into LoRa / Meshtastic gear, but all of the devices I've seen for sale operate in one of three frequency ranges. - 915 MHz, 868 MHz, and 433 MHz. Which one do I need for Portland / USA?

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[Jared Boone]

You’ll want 915 or 433 to comply with FCC regulations. The 868 MHz band is in mobile phone spectrum, but is used in Europe. I’d also think that 915 MHz would be preferable to 433 just for the amount of spectrum available. I believe the 900 MHz band runs from 902 to 928 MHz, while the 433 MHz band is maybe a couple of MHz wide. Both bands are pretty crowded these days. Caveat, I’m doing this from memory: I’d need to double-check with current spectrum allocations, or maybe I’ll just leave that as an exercise for the reader.

        - Jared

On Dec 29, 2023, at 9:16 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <zn...@algocompsynth.com> wrote:



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[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Thanks!! I've watched a few videos and its starting to look like the effort / payoff ratio for LoRa / Meshtastic is a bit too high for my tastes, even though the hardware is inexpensive. Just finding decent-quality antennas seems to be a chore. Maybe in the summer I'll see if this stuff is a little closer to consumer-ready. I don't mind troubleshooting open source software, but measuring reflectance of antennas isn't my idea of a fun time. :-)

[David Turnbull]

The ARRL publishes two giant reference books for amateur radio. One has examples of transmitters, receivers, amps, keyers, and everything except antennas. The other is about antennas. That's how much of a part antennas play in RF experiments. Especially with HF/VHF/UHF frequencies, where you're looking. You might find the antenna situation less distasteful if you can use higher frequencies like 2.4GHz and up.

[Nathan McCorkle]

I am eyeballing this esp32 library for a mesh networked camera project where I want to be able to access any camera on the mesh from my house WiFi access point:

https://gitlab.com/painlessMesh/painlessMesh

The hardware being esp32 modules seems cheap to me.

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[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Yeah ... LoRa appears to be a set of carve-outs of scarce spectrum space that don't require a ham license. It's a cool technology but I have too many hobbies already and if I'm going for another one that involves RF electronics I might as well go licensed and spend the money. :-)

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On Saturday, December 30th, 2023 at 4:43 PM, David Turnbull <dtur...@gmail.com> wrote:

The ARRL publishes two giant reference books for amateur radio. One has examples of transmitters, receivers, amps, keyers, and everything except antennas. The other is about antennas. That's how much of a part antennas play in RF experiments. Especially with HF/VHF/UHF frequencies, where you're looking. You might find the antenna situation less distasteful if you can use higher frequencies like 2.4GHz and up.

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[Eric Garner]

Having put LoRA in 2 commercial IoT products, antenna selection isn't as big a chore as you might be thinking of. I can't find your use case in what parts of the thread my email decided to save, but unless you are needing extreme range, LoRA is pretty easy to select antennas for. Even the horrible little SMT patch antennas work way better than you think they will.

-Eric 

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