@gerard_alticom invited us to the well-known Cellnex (formerly Alticom, formerly KPN/PTT) radio tower and data center in the Waarderpolder today, to discuss options to get a gateway installed at 95 meters.
As shown earlier by others, near line-of-sight situations with high altitude gateways/nodes can yield very nice ranges:
That is, an ESP8266/RFM95W node with a half wavelength dipole antenna, sending at SF7, SF9 and SF12, got its packets received at:
- Dronten, 0000024B080E00E0, 73 km, SF12
- Utrecht, AA555A00080605B7, 48 km, SF7/9/12
- Almere, 1DEE1EAE2E9F468B, 34 km, SF12
- Almere, AA555A0008060249, 34 km, SF7/9/12
- Oegstgeest, 1DEE04187DBF1BC6, 28 km, SF12
- Noordwijk, 008000000000A46D, 23 km, SF7/9/12
- Voorhout, FFFEB827EB6A415C, 23 km, SF12
- Amsterdam Buitenveldert, 008000000000B098, 15 km, SF12
- Zwanenburg, B827EBFFFEDFCD10, 5 km, SF9/12
- Haarlem, B827EBFFFF5FE05C, 3 km, SF12 (single channel gateway, SF12-only, 1st floor)
Note that at 95 meters altitude, if the gateways are at, say, 20 meters, line-of-sight propagation would limit the theoretical distance to 3.57 × (√95 + √20) ≈ 50 km. So, some funny tropospheric propagation may have helped.
And maybe some other gateways did not yet migrate to the new staging environment, which I used to get these results using the nice TTN Mapper. (Please use a recent version of the app, which allows for creating “experiments”, to avoid messing up regular coverage results!)
Gerard also reached a non-TTN Rotterdam gateway at 50+ km, SF12, using a simple quarter wavelength wire as an antenna.
Also, the municipality of Haarlem installed the first two Libelium Plug & Sense nodes this Monday. Try to find them 