John Cassidy, one of our UK friends in the IoT business and long time LoRaWAN / TTN advocate has done some live testing of our new Strips LoRa sensor.
Ultra-thin form factor, up to 10 years of battery life and up to 10 km range. That’s what we promise, but how does it really perform live? Everything depends, of course, on the LoRaWAN network, line-of-sight, landscape and obstacles, weather, and so on, but what if you take it for a drive?
That’s exactly what John did with one of our new LoRa Strips. Wearing a bicycle helmet with a mounted LoRa Strips and riding his electrical bike, John took it for a spin.
“I have reliably and repeatably hit multiple GW’s at 75 km on SF71 and 30 mph winds in the city and on hills, on my bicycle, on foot, and on the train. I am confident I can go a lot further with them, easily over 100 km. Of course, you wouldn’t plan a network service on such distances but it proves just how solid the radio and antenna are to reach such ranges. We have also been able to plan reflection off of some buildings in the heart of a major city due to the great radio performance and elegant antenna placement.”
Way better than we ever expected! (Here is the TTN Mapper link if you want to see it live.)
“I taped the Strip to my bike helmet (Boba Fett eat your heart out) so I could measure my whole journey from home to work whilst cycling and using the train.
It’s such a versatile sensor that has a million use cases but that is only half the story. The ease of combining it with TTN and some of their baked-in integrations means that it takes less than 5 minutes to get it set up and running. I have never before sent a join request using a magnet!! Seriously easy and having been that guy in the field deploying IoT, it is so much simpler than pushing reset buttons. Insanely great design consideration and affordances.”
The Sensative design rocks.”
“The Sensative team is super approachable, nothing is ever a problem and they are very professional which is becoming less and less common these days. Morgan, Holger, Fredrik and Mats have been great, they deserve their success.”
By the way, John really likes to push the boundaries of LPWA and LoRaWAN:
“I am uncertain if my LoRaWAN records (ground-to-ground distances of 536km on SF12 and 382km on SF7 last year) still stand but our recent IPv6 RAW LoRa mesh (based on Thread) last year is also a record (163km) for LPWA. I am definitely aiming to push the envelope, this year will see some great new things done in air quality, more to follow.”
“I hope 2020 opens up LoRaWAN to even more developers and the great work that Wienke, Johann and the TTN team started, will go from strength to strength. It’s great to have Sensative as part of the community.”
Contact John on twitter (@JohnCassidyGB) for more information about the tests
1 Lower SF means more chirps are sent per second; hence, you can encode more data per second. Higher SF implies fewer chirps per second; hence, there are fewer data to encode per second. Compared to lower SF, sending the same amount of data with higher SF needs more transmission time, known as airtime. More airtime means that the modem is up and running longer and consuming more energy.
SF7 is the most energy efficient setting. Read more here
