Meshtastic LoRa

Private Cyberspace CONSOLE
1

Introduction

LoRa is one of the 2 default secondary wireless protocol supported by all Private Cyberspaces. LoRa is used in situations where WiFi or Bluetooth are not practical or feasible.

Wireless technology Link distance Power consumption Connection speed
WiFi medium high high
Bluetooth low medium medium
LoRa high low low

LoRa is a sub-1GHz wireless layer for use in long range applications.

Although the default long range protocol is currently based on the LoRa protocol but the use of other long range network protocols (e.g. thread, wise, wi-sun, sigfox, ts-unb, zigbee, z-wave etc.) as well as the IEEE ones (e.g. 802.11ah, 802.11af, 802.22 etc.) is also possible.

LoRa has substantial reach, cost and privacy advantages over cellular carrier IoT offerings like LTE-M (medium throughput usage) and NB-IoT (low throughout usage), its scope is also much wider, acting as a generic text transport for humans, servers as well as sensors.

It enables citizens to communicate wirelessly over long range WITHOUT going through traditional 3G, 4G, 5G cellular mobile networks.

Typically 1-2km indoors within buildings and 10-20 km outdoors with line of sight. By adding mesh relays the range can be substantially expanded.

Currently Meshtastic and LoRaWAN protocols are supported in VPMs over LoRa.

  1. Meshtastic - decentralised use cases
  2. LoRaWAN - centralised use cases

Both protocols have their own use cases, but If the LoRa mesh application you plan to develop will work equally well with Meshtastic or LoRaWAN, then Meshtastic is preferred due its simplicity.

Virtual Private Meshes has a dedicated communication layer for transport of short status messages to complement its general purpose Campus communication layer.

Currently the length of each status message can be up to 200 bytes. This length limit enables a communication mesh to be design with very nice characteristics (e.g. low cost, low power, long range, interference avoidance, self-healing, rapid deployment etc.) .

can use Low Frequency Radio Mesh to substantially supports for low power applications (e.g. battery and solar) with its Low Power Mesh layer.

  1. Low Power Mesh supports Internet of Things (IoT) as well as Internet for People.
  2. Low Power Mesh works over the Wide Area Network (like LPWAN) as well as over the Local Area Network.
2

Meshtastic

Meshtastic Guidelines

  1. If a device does not support concurrent bluetooth and wifi, then wifi should be used.
  2. Use the latest release if possible.

Meshtastic Australia

Australian government has allocated 915 MHz to 928 MHz for use as an ISM band.

When buying LoRa equipment for use with Meshtastic in Australia, please get the 915 MHz version. Note 923 MHz is also legal to use in Australia, the 923 MHz version might work but we would like to keep everyone on 915 Mhz for now.

Start Frequency: 916.0 MHz
Frequency Spacing: 0.5 MHz
Channel Number: 20

Meshtastic HAM

Meshtastic has a set-ham option to for used by Amateur Radio operators. They can use their license to boost Lora power and range in some countries.

Meshtastic References

https://wiki.oevsv.at/wiki/MeshCom

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LoRaWAN

Due to its centralised design, LoRaWAN is not our preferred IoT network, by it has a large installed based, so it supported by Virtual Private Mesh (VPM).

LoRaWAN Australia

Australian government has allocated 915 MHz to 928 MHz for use as an ISM band.

When buying LoRa equipment for use with LoRaWAN in Australia, please get the 915 MHz version. Note 923 MHz is also legal to use in Australia and LoRaWAN has been deployed using 923 MHz in Australia but we would like to keep everyone on 915 Mhz for now.

AU915-928

  • 64 channels total
  • 30 dBM EIRP
  • Each of the 64 channels is 0.2 MHz wide (1st channel centred on 915.2MHz and 64th channel centred on 927.8 MHz)

AS920-923 / AS923-925

  • 16 channels total
  • 16 dBM EIRP

LoRaWAN Server

The following LoRaWAN servers have been tested to work with VPM:

  1. ChirpStack
  2. Lora-Feed
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LoRaWAN Security

Despite LoRaWAN's best intentions, defining end-to-end security centrally that covers device, network and application layers can be problematic - any weakness affects every device and application on the network.

Trend Mirco

IOActive

Official PDF no longer available:

However, reports on it still online:

Decoding LoRaWAN 1.0

LoRaWAN 1.1 is more secure but LoRaWAN 1.0 is still widely deployed and easily hacked:

Energy Attack

Increase energy consumption (e.g. depletion of battery) without needing to know any secret keys:

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LoRa Chipset

SX1262 is preferred over SX1276

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GNSS Chipset

LoRa devices uses a wide range of GNSS chipsets.

The u-blox NEO-6M module supports GPS only

The Quectel L76K module does NOT support Galileo (only GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS):

The u-blox NEO-M8N module does support BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS, GPS, QZSS