Hello, I am experiencing a very limited LoraWAN transmission range with my Wireless Stick devices. My expectations would be anywhere between 2 and 10 km, but I never there. Moverover, my devices do not even reach a gateway that is located in the same building. Any hints additional test, etc. would be appreciated!
Cheers, Markus
Very limited transmission range with Wireless Stick
Hi Markus,
I am stuck on a similar situation. The problem seems to be that the join request is sent at SF7 which is quite lackluster for larger range, and it doesn’t seem to want to go higher SF.
In a couple of days or two weeks I’ll be trying to get it to join at higher SF - if I succeed, I’ll give you a follow-up.
Or if you find something, let me know please!
Cheers, Steven
dear Steven,
thanks for your reply.
At the time of my post I was using the ABP connection scheme, based on an example from LMIC/MCCI library. And yes it was using SF7 (which does not mean a lot to me…).
In the meantime I ran tests with the OTAA connection scheme, thinking OTAA would make a judicious choice for radio frequency settings. But no, I got the same result, still no connection beyond 200m 
Was my assumption wrong, do I need to configure SF selection even when using OTAA?
kind regards,
Markus
Steven, thanks again for your hint. Just tried increasing the spread factor of the LMIC/MCCI ABP example from SF7 to SF9 using the following command.
LMIC_setDrTxpow(DR_SF9,14);
It did make a difference for me. (And - between us - I went higher than SF9 and it got even better. But it seems, that one does not make a lot of friends cranking the SF up agressively. And, I believe, one can get in conflict with regulations, too. The reason being, that by doing so one pollutes everybody’s frequency space. You probably know all that)
It remains an open question to me, how to increase LoraWAN range using OTAA. Got a few interesting pieces of information here, though.
cheers,
Markus
1 Like