[johanstokking]

CTO & co-founder of The Things Network here! I've been working with LoRa for over eight years now, and I keep getting surprised by measurements like this. What started off as "line of sight works" went to a successful "LoRa moon bounce" [0] and now a sea level reception over 830 miles.

So, any physics people here care to comment how this works? Is this pure atmospheric refraction or is there something else?

[0] https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2021/first-lora-message-bounce...

[femto]

To some extent it's statistics. Send enough messages and the odds are one will eventually get though.

> providing a standardized and objective measure of the technology's capabilities

Not really. The environment is still variable. A short message could have bounced off some random short duration reflector somewhere (aeroplane, meteor, lightning, ...) or have been refracted by some short term effect. Standardised and objective is an anechoic chamber or a cabled in attenuators/channel simulator.

[wienke]

Yes, this is an outlier and it took around 8 years for this to be emerge and be detected by the community run TTN mapper initiative. The main fun thing about this is more that it shows how cool it is to have a global community network where we enjoy sending messages for the sake of it just to learn technology. Like kids with 2 cans and a string between them.

[pmuk]

I've just disconnected a BobCat miner so I have a spare 1.1m 8.5dBi 868MHz antenna on my roof. Can you recommend a good gateway to get started on TTN?

[wienke]

Recently somebody created this guide to turn your Helium gateway (running on a RPi) to a TTN gateway: https://medium.com/@friedkiwi/repurposing-helium-iot-hotspot...

[zikduruqe]

A CTO that doesn't understand RF and has been working with it for 8 years? <surprised Pikachu face>

[knorker]

Hi. Cool work. For this particular record, could you confirm that this was on 868MHz?

[wienke]

Yes, this was 868MHz