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
Sure thing @BoRRoZ, where can I sign up? 
Yeah, totally get what you mean, just curious as to the technology’s limitations, what’s allowed, what’s possible and what’ll work. I do now understand that real time tracking is not possible, but I’ll 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 stat’s needs to be tracked. similar use case (internationally) for elderly person who’ve 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 ‘lane’ for these ‘life threatening’ 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 interrupted…
that’s an idea , I remember an article about LoRaWAN underwater but can’t find it right now
yes that’s true… the higher the frequency’s the shorter the range.
that’s why subs use ultralow frequencies to communicate.
Geez, this conversation has really grown a bit. On the idea of LoRaWAN penetration in water you stated that:
the higher the frequency’s 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 LoRaWAN’s ability in water that you were talking about:
Hi there, I’ve 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.
LoRaWAN’s 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. It’s 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 that’s 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? That’s 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? It’s 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?
Food for thought.
there will always remain ‘blank spots’ on the map (rural areas) where there’s no LoRaWAN coverage.
you won’t solve that with compensation, also LoRaWAN depends on 'normal internet connections, so if these are not available you’ll need a gateway with a simcard.
also you’ll see activities in LoRaWAN over satellite… maybe that’s 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?
yes of course… but who installs those sim LoRaWAN gateways in 'blank spot area’s ?
what’s the business model ? maybe big telecoms ?
The same type of folks setting up TTN gateways could be motivated. I don’t know what you have in AU for commercial LoRaWAN network operators, but here in NA there’s 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 (let’s all agree that LoRaWAN infrastructure is very low cost compared to what we are used to now). If there’s a business case, then it can happen.
Let’s 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. There’s the business case.
don’t know… I’m Dutch 
I don’t know what you have in AU for commercial LoRaWAN network operators
Australia’s network is pretty new and in its baby stages. I’d say it is a year or so behind some of the bigger European places with heaps of gateways, so I don’t know of too many LoRaWAN network operators other than small time stuff. There are people out there, but no major company has implemented, nor deployed it over here.
Hypothetically, the idea of an emergency device such as a tracker which only transmits if unusual activity is present would not come into facing fair use policy limits as much as if it was based on transmissions over a longer period of time, say 1 week. Therefore, you could have devices blast a heap off messages in a really short period which is great for tracking, but this could create stress on the network as it is using the airways in one clump rather than spread out.
Is this why the fair use policy is based on a 24 hour period, such that transmission, even though they could be in higher numbers, are spread over a longer and more spaced out period of time?
So at the moment, a device with doesn’t transmit at all for months on end, but exceeds the fair use policy on a single day would be in abuse, even though over that period of time it is utilising less of the network than a device which follows the policy. On the surface it makes sense, but if the intention of the fair use policy is to reduce clogging of the network, it seems to address the issue partially, but on the other hand I don’t know how you could do it any other way.
I’m just throwing another idea on the table.
exactly … I’m about to merge 3 topics that seems to go al in the same direction, ‘how can we bend/stretch the TTN fair use policy’