LoRa from the City to the Mountains: Exploration of Hardware and Environmental Factors

LoRa technology is an increasingly popular option for applications that can exploit its low power and long range capabilities. While most efforts to date have studied its characteristics for smart city environments, we take LoRa outside the city limits, exploring how the environment affects its core communication properties. Specifically, we offer two novel parameter explorations to understand first how vegetation affects communication range and second how antennas change radio behavior. Our results provide insight into LoRa in non-urban environments, specifically showing that vegetation dramatically reduces the communication range and that the antenna selection can have a profound effect.