921 Metres Through Suburban Brisbane with a LoRaWAN Node — Here's What the Data Showed.
The Setup I built a two-node LoRaWAN sensor network on STM32WL55JC1 microcontrollers running Rust/Embassy firmware — the full story is in Part 1. One of the two nodes, lora-2, carries no sensor. Its only job is to send a confirmed uplink every ~10 seconds, display RSSI, SNR, and DR on its OLED, and let the gateway’s InfluxDB record tell the story later. You might wonder why I didn’t just use lora-1 — the sensor node — for this test. Both nodes send a 4-byte payload, so packet size is identical and makes no difference to range. What matters is transmission behaviour: lora-2 sends every uplink confirmed, so a missed ACK is detected within one cycle. lora-1 only confirms every fifth uplink, meaning gateway loss takes much longer to register. lora-2 also transmits every ~10 seconds versus lora-1’s ~30 seconds — three times the data points in InfluxDB, three times the resolution when overlaying against GPS waypoints later. Purpose-built beats repurposed. ...
