Andrew Moser looks at testing LoRa radio transmission at a whopping two Watts:
Recently I noticed NiceRF selling 2 Watt LoRa radios. With my last range test years ago getting 4+ miles of range on 100mW. I decided to try again with these higher power modules. Spoiler – at ~45 miles, I could reliably transfer packets with receiver RSSI of -120 to -123dBm with the base station’s link limit rated for -139dBm (based off module datasheet).
What were the secret sauce lora configs? Radiolib library used: BW=62.5, SF=12, CR=8, preamble was increased when testing lower BW, but don’t think it’s needed for utilized BW. Note that this is SLOW. Like 4-5 seconds to send a 25 byte payload. While this isn’t practical for many applications: this was a range test, practicality depends on the application and there is no application here.
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