Australia is a big continent and Iâm sure there is not 100 % LoRaWAN coverage.
That means that if an object is stolen, it would be very fast âof the LoRaWAN radarâ
It can start transmitting itâs location as soon as movement is detected when the alarm is set, but the signal wonât be received when there are no gateways around, hence the object is âlostâ
â You are probably asking, why not use a SIM card for such an important asset? â
indeed ⌠use the most suitable platform⌠and in your case thatâs probably not LoRaWAN
Thanks for the clarification UdLoRA. I didnât realise how many messages you could send without exceeding the fair access policy. Itâs more than I expected, therefore the likelihood that the fair access policy would need to be exceeded is significantly reduced. Iâm just curious, how did you calculate that and can you determine the maximum messages per day per SF?
There is an airtime calculator here, however if you ever sent a packet from a node to TTN , you had seen the airtime in the console. And since I did, I know that at SF12 (almost needed for moving nodes), you could expect 1.2-1.4 seconds, depending on how much extra information you send, like battery status, message type, etc.
BoRRoZ, totally understand your point. There absolutely isnât 100% LoRaWAN coverage in Australia, however there is good coverage in capital cities where the majority of the population live, meaning there is little benefit of covering all of Australia at this point in time. Trust me when I say that there are parts of the country where there is no telephone coverage and the closest shop can be hundreds of kilometres away.
According to this website, âOver 85% of Australians lived in urban areas and nearly 70% lived in our capital cities, making Australia one of the worldâs most urbanised countriesâ which leads me to believe that thefts would follow similar statistics. The next question would be, where would a thief the take for example a stolen car. The likelihood would be that they wouldnât drive it to the middle of the desert as they have to get away. In my opinion they would either remain in the metropolitan area or drive interstate to another city, of which there is a likely a LoRaWAN connection, so even though there may be no connection along the way, by the time they reach their destination, the node would transmit a message and be received.
Regarding your idea about an alarm feature, would you propose that this could occur through the receiving functionality of a node on the LoRaWAN network?
You need software that sends intelligently (motion recognition, etc), and there is no need to receive (unless you want to lock the car), also because on downlinks the fair access policy is stricter.
@BoRRoZ: I participated in a project on tracking (and from that started the personal curiosity that brought me here ), and indeed is possible, provided that tracked objects have limited mobility, or that their security area could be identified (geofencing). Not sure this is the case
Yeah, totally get what you mean, just curious as to the technologyâs limitations, whatâs allowed, whatâs possible and whatâll work. I do now understand that real time tracking is not possible, but Iâll sure look into the 10 minute process @UdLoRa described.
I just finished a hackathon and had to rule out the use of LoRa (unfortunately) for emergency tracking if someone is injured in a high rick activity such as rock fishing, and falls in the water, and position of their life vest and bio statâs needs to be tracked. similar use case (internationally) for elderly person whoâve had a fall and lives alone. It would be good if possible to apply for a special class license in safety related use cases.
in a few years there will be a special 5G âlaneâ for these âlife threateningâ applications imho, they are on the drawingboard, also for medical devices that patients can wear and need to be 100% connected
choose the right platform ⌠LoRaWAN is great but not for everything
Having done my fair share of dangerous activities (for fun) it is clear to me that LoRa would be next to useless for emergency tracking in such circumstances. Where a lot of these activities take place you will often not get even get mobile phone coverage, even with the billions that have been spent on building telecom infrastructures.
I agree that 5G will probably take over the aged care monitoring market.
In the speciific case of dive charters to remote locations (that often have fierce currents) If you had a dive vessel fitted with a private gateway it may serve as a diver location platform - if each dier had a wearable (unclear of aerial arrangement required for LoRa in Water - if sea state creates large troughs and swells and line of site is interruptedâŚ
Geez, this conversation has really grown a bit. On the idea of LoRaWAN penetration in water you stated that:
the higher the frequencyâs the shorter the range
Would there be a recordable difference between 428MHz and 915MHz? Unfortunately, I lack a comprehensive understanding about radio strength, so we we assumed it had the same power, would the distance be approximately half on 915?
@Custom-IoT The idea sounds good, however I think the first issue would be infrastructure. The LoRaWAN network is very new and in comparison to the other networks is not that widely available. I do understand that my asset theft idea faces similar issues, but unfortunately you would also face the problem that the majority of gateways are in populated or metropolitan areas, often were these dangerous activities are not undertaken.
By the way, I think this may be the discussion about LoRaWANâs ability in water that you were talking about:
Hi there, Iâve been looking at LoRaWAN for tracking for a while now. One thing I can say that it potentially opens up new markets for tracking low to medium value assets. Contrast that to SIM-based tracking solutions, which are, right now, really only suitable for tracking high value assets - think trains planes and automobiles. Objects that can tolerate bulky batteries or provide a DC supply.
LoRaWANâs trade-off against SIM is small size for higher latency and lower reliability, hence the suitability for low-medium value asset tracking. Now I will admit there is a consumer-product bias in this discussion, which has a big factor in driving the cost of the solution down. Itâs actually not a great place to be playing in right now - the hardware will only get more commoditized as costs drive to 0. Tracking solution vendors are scrambling to find differentiation in the total solution which is relying more and more on the cloud services offering.
And as we know, cellular operators are moving in with competing solutions based on technologies like NB-IoT. For safety of life or any kind of emergency-based solution these regulated solutions will be the only way to realistically proceed.
Now thatâs just the uplink technology.
What about the actual position fixing? Here I think there is a little more room for innovation because the traditional solution of using GPS is really poor for tracking low-medium value assets (or many kinds of assets). GPS is power-hungry, finicky, unreliable. Why does it work on your cellphone? Thatâs because your mobile super-computer is using its vast bandwidth to keep the GPS engine running in top form in so-called Assisted GPS mode.
Here, LoRaWAN could offer a competitive advantage over even similarly priced SIM-based solutions that must rely on GPS. Unlink cellular, LoRaWAN is not limited in the number of gateways that can be placed. As a result, network-based positioning of the sensors is possible and with useful accuracy.
I really see only one way forward for LoRaWAN to compete with cellular for tracking low to medium value assets - and that is with network-based positioning so that the sensor size and cost can drive down, commensurate with the asset they are tracking.
The question is how do we get to the right density of gateway deployment? Itâs chicken and egg in some ways. What if you were compensated to run and maintain a gateway? Would that incentivize the mass deployment of gateways to support sufficient RSSI and/or TDoA network-based location of sensors? What if you were compensated a portion of a crypto-token or reward for recognition of your efforts of moving data packets from sensor to cloud?
there will always remain âblank spotsâ on the map (rural areas) where thereâs no LoRaWAN coverage.
you wonât solve that with compensation, also LoRaWAN depends on 'normal internet connections, so if these are not available youâll need a gateway with a simcard.
also youâll see activities in LoRaWAN over satellite⌠maybe thatâs the future ?
Hmm, I think if there is cellular coverage in any given region there can be LoRaWAN coverage too, and in fact LoRaWAN may be better suited for rural deployments - also considering there is a lot of potential for asset / food chain management applications on farms, to list just one example, that would be ideal for LoRaWAN.
I suppose one could ask: if there is no coverage because there is no infrastructure, then would any asset worth tracking ever go there?
The same type of folks setting up TTN gateways could be motivated. I donât know what you have in AU for commercial LoRaWAN network operators, but here in NA thereâs a couple like MachineQ and Senet, both of which offer the capability to deploy a gateway to any location to extend coverage for a really modest fee (letâs all agree that LoRaWAN infrastructure is very low cost compared to what we are used to now). If thereâs a business case, then it can happen.
Letâs say that business case is several farms in an area want to monitor soil and atmospheric conditions with several sensors each. A solution provider charges the farm operations a monthly fee to acquire the data, scrub it, and make it available to the farm operators in a way that works with their processes. Actionable data. There is value in this. The sensors would be deployed for no cost probably, owned and maintained by the solution provider (I mean, what customer really wants to deal with managing yet another piece of technology?) These farmers just want to get the most and best quality product to market, while minimizing their costs to do it.
The network operator and solution provider share that monthly revenue. Thereâs the business case.