I was looking for a real LoRaWan experimentation on the field, not only a given open field performance where the result do not match the reality.

For this reason, I installed a Kerlink gateway on a friend’s balcony living on a high part of my city. Then I moved a tracker reporting its GPS position on regular basis and day after day I built a map of the area covered by this antenna.

This post details the results of this expermientation

The following map shows the result of this test :

LoRa in Clermont-Ferrand coverage map with a single antenna

Clermont-Ferrand is a city with mountains all around, for this reason the western coverage and the northern coverage are really limited but the eastern and south-eastern zone are more opened and the coverage is much more higher.

This map show this performance obtained with an antenna not optimized in the device and a base-station antenna in a good situation but not as well as for a public operator.

The device was communicating at 6Kbps and the 10,6km max distance could be longer if I was testing in a larger perimeter.

The points on the middle of the city are, for most of them, obtained in a dense city area with home having large rock walls, some in small road like old style city canyon.

The missing information at this point is the loss ratio, I’ll publish these information as soon as I will compute them.

That said I’m really happy of such nice results and performance obtained with LoRaWan. It was to understand/demonstrate the capability to deploy city-wide IoT application using a single gateway point.