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The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.

Not to say they don't fill a niche, but bandwidth and range limit it's viability to small operations; even an optimal network cant handle more than a few hundred tweets per hour.

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> The range of these lora nodes is a bit of a myth. It is better than higher frequencies but you shouldn't expect anything more than a km with obstructions, realistically half that.

I've done a number of projects with commercial radios operating in the 902-928MHz unlicensed band and typically we target 1-10 mi (roughly 1-20km). Elevated antennas with enough gain to get you to the legal limit (4W EIRP) can get you a heck of a lot of range, even without line of sight.

With line of sight, communication to the horizon is possible.

If you're talking about the EU 869 MHz unlicensed band used by LoraWAN, thats quite a bit different and I'm less familiar.

With no Line of Sight and crowded urban environment, it worked only slightly better than Wifi for my previous employer. Not even 100 meters.

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