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Comment by alepper | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking at something similar at the moment, but in agricultural areas where line-of-sight is inhibited only by foliage and terrain. For my purpose, it's OK to collect an SD card every so often, but I've toyed with the idea of an ESP8266 and a directional antenna to e.g. a mobile broadband router, probably again with an antenna upgrade.

Earlier today, I found [1] which - amongst other things which you might be interested in - calls out a venture [2] to establish a network of 'citizen scientist' type flood sensors across the UK. Their scheme looks to be a network of radio-to-Internet gateways which support a number of independently-deployed sensor nodes.

[1] http://oomlout.co.uk/blogs/news/81763329-an-overview-of-ardu... [2] http://flood.network/

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I am a hydrographer in the NT working out in very remote areas- Phone reception is rarely possible for such monitoring sites. Currently we use satellite Comms. to relay water data home, but this is very expensive and prone to failure.

I'm wondering if you, or anyone else, has some ideas on long range communication strategies for large areas (NT is 1.4 million km2).

The area we are required to cover generally means sites are chosen based on accessibility rather than operational importance — it would be great if we could expand the network with low maintenance loggers capable of communicating long distances.

What update frequency is required?

It's heavily dependent on river/climate conditions. During the dry most loggers will only need to be polled once every hour. However, during the buildup and wet, the stations would ideally be sending back every ~5 minutes.

Which operator are you using? We've found L-band to be very reliable and does not suffer from any of the attenuation issues found in Ku. And heavy spreading on the return path provides for an even more resilient link.

Disclosure: We'll be offering an L-band satellite gateway for IoT this summer.

We currently use Iridium. On Ku band I beleive. I'll look further into this and see what our options are for L-band.

Outernet looks like a great project. How small of a satellite can be used to achieve the connection? Any more info/documentation on the L-band gateway?

Thank you, you people are awesome!

I just needed to get the correct keywords to google and came across:

http://postscapes.com/cellular-internet-of-things-developmen...

The dataplan on some look very reasonable, like $1/MB/Month, but the hardware itself seems cost prohibitive.

I mean, the Dash costs $59 or the Electron at $39 just for the board to send over 2G? You can get a disposable cellphone for < $10 complete with LCD screen and that worm eating game!

I guess I'll just need to wait another year or two until economies of scale kicks in...

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