Episode 10 – LoRa Radio Demo

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This week’s video is a full demonstration of LoRa radio. I set up two Arduino Uno microcontrollers with LoRa radio transceivers and tested RF communications between them in my home lab.

LoRa stands for Long Range and is an off-grid low power radio frequency communication technique. LoRa itself doesn’t include encryption, but you can utilize encryption through the software that lives on your microcontroller or computer.

LoRa can reach 2-5 kilometers in an urban setting and 10 kilometers or more in a rural area. The use of LoRA is completely free, aside from purchasing the hardware itself. It doesn’t require any licenses, subscriptions or other restrictions. It has a fairly low bandwidth – the transceiver I used supported 19 Kbps. This is generally suitable for applications such as sensors, texting, and compressed voice communications.

It’s helpful to understand encrypted off-grid communication, both for sensors / systems applications as well as in-person communication. One should not assume that because you yourself use a cell phone that everyone uses a cell phone for communication. Technology such as LoRa provides some insight into the world of secure off-grid communication.

Here is a look at the lab setup I used. For full details see the video above.