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Comment by chuckledog | Hacker News Reader

OP observed up to 20x that range https://www.distancefromto.net/distance-from-sheffield-gb-to...

And all of these range examples are completely irrelevant to the distances you'll achieve using lora in practice. But while we're on the subject there's been lora from/to geosynchronous orbit. So I think that's the distance record: https://hackaday.com/2018/02/22/at-71572-km-you-wont-beat-th...

At VHF and up the only thing that really matters is line of sight. Everything else modulation wise is just frosting. Unless you're in a plane/balloon/etc or paying for power and location on a very tall building Lora isn't going to go any further than your 2.4 GHz wifi router.

These contrived setups for distant records (and using transient tropo ducting) are just for fun.

While I agree the sentiment that the silly range ones are just for fun, I have in practice seen good links over ranges with no line of sight.

I've personally observed links through many buildings, over hills, and so forth that easily dwarf the range of the average 2.4Ghz link.

950Mhz/860Mhz is fine, 315/433Mhz is even better for longer distance but it seems Europe/USA are mostly 950/860Mhz only.

I see your 71572km and raise you a 3.5W radio signal received on Earth from the distance of 1.2 billion km: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2005/2005020...

Impressive, but the linked article didn't uses a high gain antenna array like was used to communicate with deep space probes.

They specifically wanted something with a low barrier to entry. Take a look at the antenna they used. Pretty impressive imo.

If I read that right, they used a GEO satellite as a relay, which is nothing like a low-power device, and GP's point was the asymmetrical distance record. Similarly, Hyugens experiment used a simple patch antenna at Titan (that's why it's notable), and a high-gain antenna on Earth.

Guess I should have read further in.

That's not lora modulated. My example was.

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