We deployed a private LoRa (and also an LTE) network on the Greenland ice sheet for one of our experiments. We use LTE for data transfer and LoRAWAN for housekeeping / control (and leave it on during the winter when we have no solar power and are basically just monitoring our batteries). We are taking full advantage of our remote location and Greenland's nebulous ITU region to have them in almost the same band (using LTE band 8 and LoRa in the US ISM band).

The most annoying part was porting LoRaMAC to the samd21, since getting the timing reliable was a bit of a pain. We used the sx1272 as our radio.

We use a Chirpstack backend, which handles authentication and such and passes the unencrypted the LoRaWAN messages over mqtt, which we subscribe to, decode, and stick into a pgsql database on our server on the ice sheet. We then use log shipping replication to get a replica of the database to a server sitting in our lab where we are not bandwidth constrained for monitoring.