Dang, so close to a truly 'lite figure for the record .. challenge accepted!
I've had a plan to blanket my city (Vienna) with LoRa and create my own local Internet, wiring up only retro computers .. seems like its time to break out the ol' lunchboxes and get cracking.
That's a neat idea. The challenge will be to stop it from becoming a huge success because then you get all of the problems that are endemic on the normal internet as well. But that sounds like a very interesting and worthwhile project.
This is a truly awesome resource - thanks for sharing that! I'll be getting the retro computing crew, that is forming around our new exhibit at the Retro Gaming Museum, excited about this!
Who knows, maybe we will have a retro- net up and running in the next few days ..
Yeah... But WiFi doesn't work when I'm sitting on the toilet two rooms down the corridor. Crazy times.
No, to be honest: Very impressive. It's kind of a "dream" of me, to bring Internet to the river/picknick area two kilometers away from me. LoRa would probably be the way to go, will have to look further into that.
You're looking LoRaWan which is not the same as LoRa. In fact I believe web browsing to be quite feasible if you just use LoRa with your own network stack.
I did this once as a small experiment. Basically use a small TCP stack with LoRa as layer 1 and then expose the whole thing as a Linux kernel module. It was a bit shitty but it seemed promising.
For some reason, I don't find LoRaWan at all alluring. As far as I can tell, in the end it's in the hands of one company and that really defeats the spirit for me. I mostly just use LoRa for point-to-point connections with my own shitty networking stack.
At least on 868 MHz, if you stick to the 1% duty cycle limitations that the ISM band allows, I doubt that you'll be happy with the web surfing performance.
This may be an EU duty cycle vs US time per channel thing? In the US you can frequency hop to get higher performance (the limit here is no more than 400ms per 20s per channel), which seems more aggressive than the 1% power sub-band EU rule (but ianal and I haven't read the EU rules carefully).
That is pretty cool. You might want to try again with 2.4Ghz LoRa. Range is shorter but still longer than 868mhz. If you search 2.4Ghz LoRa on our Youtube channel you'll find some interesting content on that.
From the relatively little I understand the lower the radio frequency the lower the bandwidth but more range it has/can pass through, while conversely the higher frequency the more bandwidth but shorter range/harder to penetrate obstacles (see eg: 5G). LoRa is the former and used for very low bandwidth applications, so not really suitable for browsing websites but has been used for for remote IoT stats, text messaging, etc.
(Fwiw I wasn't the one who downvoted but thought it'd be worth mentioning)
It's not so much about the frequency (though what you say is true), as there's LoRa at 2.4 GHz as well. I'm guessing the one in the article was 868/915 MHz, though.
Define "internet". LoRA is more like an occasional SMS service than a network connection, so I doubt you could get the average modern 100 MB website to render through it. Would be more practical to get a Starlink dish set up or a directional wifi antenna on both ends, those can do a few km on a good day.
Or just you know, use the 4G that is probably there already.
This is not entirely accurate. LoRa is a patented RF technology owned by Semtech. LoRaWAN is a standard maintained by the LoRa Alliance (which is not very different from other standards and marketing bodies). The Things Network (founded by @wienke and myself) is a developer community around LoRaWAN and a free to use cloud service intended for R&D and non-commercial use cases.
You can get a LoRa transmitter/receiver for like $5 and setup your own network. Documentation and datasheets are freely available. They are really not printing money with that technology.
There isn't any opensource modulation scheme that comes even close to LoRa.
So it takes more than 5 dollars. You also need a gateway but you can get these for 99 dollars. Still this technology has a very low barrier to entry for such a long range and low power capability.
For people reading this since I'm certain wienke knows this, you can also do point to point or mesh LoRA between cheap devices (e.g. Meshtastic). You don't necessarily need a multi-channel gateway, depends on what you want to do.
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?
If the content is good and nobody is hiding their affiliation with it then the correct word is just "posting". Otherwise it might fit within one of the categories you mentioned.
I agree that it would be better if they were up front with their affiliation, but hiding it (astroturfing) is not the same as not divulging.
The submitter is a low karma anonymous account that just so happens to match the last name of the CEO of the company, so it isn't disclosed. Also this shot up on the 'new' page suggesting more than one company vote, this isn't the first time this happens with that particular domain either.
Similar stuff is happening on Wikipedia, read the talk page there (and the LoRa page) to see what I'm getting at.
Are comments really the best place to hash this out?
Why not just flag and move on.
People don't need to disclose who they are when submitting things to HN.
Hell, I used to have a pretty comprehensive bio, until I replaced it with an icloud relay email because random internet people would look me up outside HN and try to dig up stuff to use as ammo in response to comments I posted that they disagreed with.
HN can be a nasty place. I don't fault anyone for hiding their identity.
> People don't need to disclose who they are when submitting things to HN.
Companies aren't people. That's one of those things I just don't subscribe to. If you are the CEO of a company and you are engaging in what can only be termed as marketing activities, effectively advertising your company I think you should be up front about that. Otherwise you can no longer see the difference between organic interest in a technology and marketing push, which are two entirely different things.
> Maybe there’s some niche politics that I’m unaware of in the LoRa space that is triggering.
Not that I'm aware of, but their WP talk page is pretty clear about them abusing WP for marketing purposes and that doesn't give them the benefit of the doubt with me when interacting with HN in this way, besides that the initial votes were so fast that I doubt that it was organic. But when dang wakes up I'm sure he'll be able to rule that out or confirm it. For all I know it is all legit but it certainly looked weird. Also note how the CTO nicely disclosed who he was but the CEO did not well after joining the thread until prompted to do so. Which makes me suspect this is a bit more organized than it may seem at first glance, but then again, that's not my call to make.
It's the combination of company URL, posted by a company person, commented on by another company person pushing questions (i.e. generate engagement) that seemed weird, and feels orchestrated.
It's well possible that this was really an innocent accident, but it would have looked better if something like this engagement post was posted by the same account as the original link.
I think I don't know 99% of the CEOs posting here, and I also don't need to? In the end similarly as any other employee posting for his company, and disclosure in the post is just fine? Don't get it.
HN is weird in that there is a format for that, which, as a relatively new entrant you may not be aware of, but that's what 'Show HN' is for, so that you know that whoever is posting something is associated with the article. Otherwise you will get to the point where HN is just another advertising medium, only with the ads not labelled as ads.
Is that written somewhere? Maybe just different understandings and expectations.. but for me "Show HN" is about here is my work/project I'm proud of, want to share with the rest of the world, want to have it discussed. For a normal news, even if you are the author of submitting, not sure if that's necessary. "Show HN" is imo not the anti-astroturfing disclosure, and for my expectations I would actually be a bit surprised and sad if a "Show HN" here would have lead me to just this little announcement, and maybe even downvote it :)
Yes, that's written somewhere but I'm not going to quite from private correspondence. I was recently corrected when I mentioned that Show HN is for projects rather than for companies and apparently it is for companies as well. As you can see by clicking the 'Show' link at the top of the page.
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread
Feels like it fits exactly my understanding? Not company vs person/project, but press release/announcement vs something to play with, something easily accessible and tryable, detailed?? And it goes much further that it must be something like this.. and no mention at all that this is the necessary disclosure if this is your article, newsletter or similar.... this one here definitely not a "Show HN"!
This seems bizarre to me, as this isn't astroturfing at all - it's a marketing post on the official company blog! There's no suggestion whatsoever that this is coming from raw grassroots enthusiasm. This is clearly marketing content directly from the business itself.
To be clear, that's fine! This is definitely interesting content, and companies with genuinely interesting things to share should share them directly, that's great. I can't speak for the wikipedia behaviour, but I think complaining about this post is unreasonable.
Posted to HN, by an account that isn't clearly affiliated with the content, most likely upvotes by a bunch of company people, and from a company that has a history of using public resources like marketing channels.
As for whether or not this is fine: yes, it's fine. "Show HN: We reached a new RF distance record with LoRa" from an account associated with the company.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
"Plain obvious" is an argument that it's not astroturfing.
It's a link to a blog on the company site, linked by someone whose profile clearly discloses they're CEO of the company. (though based on comments below, the disclosure in profile might be an hour more recent than the post itself).
Personally, I find this interesting, on-topic, and (after the profile edit, if any) totally fine.
So, in your opinion plain obvious astroturfing can never be astroturfing?
It's obvious to me because (1) I'm aware of the company, (2) know that there have been issues with their WP entries in the past (and still are, they are essentially marketing copy), and finally (3) because it just so happens that the company is Dutch and I keep an eye on the local eco-system. But it probably wasn't that obvious to you.
These guys have nice tech, but they are working the web in a way that doesn't sit right with me. If you're ok with this then no problem, let's see how you feel when HN and WP are
overrun by advertising that masquerades as organic postings.
Correct. I don't think the CEO of Y can ever say "I'm the CEO of Y and here's a link to a blog on Y company website about something related to Y company that I think is worth sharing here" and have it be astro-turfing for Y. It might be advertising or even spamming. It might become too frequent or annoying or otherwise negative.
I follow TTN (and Helium), have a TTN gateway plugged in, and a dozen or so LoRa dev boards sitting around (two are within reach, albeit buried under some dust of recent disuse).
I find the LoRa tech interesting in general and a new RF distance record specifically interesting, whether it's on the TTN blog, the Helium site, on an Andreas Spiess video, or elsewhere. It sounds like you have some relevant history with the company's behavior that is shaping your opinion of their action here. We perceive their action here differently as a result.
But that's the point: they didn't say they were CEO of Y. If you didn't happen to know the name of the CEO and match that to the HN handle there is absolutely nothing either on that page, nor was there in the CEO's HN bio to advise you of those facts.
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.
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.
At this distance you need a 130km-high tower for line of sight due to earth’s curvature. The previous record was set on a balloon flying at 38km height. LoRa uses high frequencies so shouldn’t benefit from the ground effect?
Cool! I had a tour a few months ago at this Telescope in Dwingeloo. Highly recommended, was amazing to hear the live sound of a pulsar (in the Crab Nebula).
In the last few years, the RC market (drones, airplanes, etc) has shifted to LoRa for the control link. A tiny, battery-powered transmitter/receiver pair lets me go 50km easily, which is just amazing.
ExpressLRS has taken everything by storm, partly because it's a well-governed open source project, and it manages to innovate many times faster than the old companies manage to fix bugs in their own products.
LoRa runs in the 868 MHz band (in Europe) - a frequency range known for being line of sight only as the ionosphere doesn't reflect radio waves of that high frequency.
However sometimes you can get Troposheric propagation on these high frequency bands. This used to be common when I was a teenager living in the south of England in Kent and we could occasionally receive racy TV channels from Europe.
> Tropospheric propagated signals travel in the part of the atmosphere adjacent to the surface and extending to some 25,000 feet (8 km). Such signals are thus directly affected by weather conditions extending over some hundreds of miles. During very settled, warm anticyclonic weather (i.e., high pressure), usually weak signals from distant transmitters improve in strength.
Radio Amateurs love this kind of propagation. It is very variable, doesn't last long, but can give you contacts over great distances on frequencies which are usually line of sight. I think the record for radio amateurs on the 70 cm band (430-440 MHz) is over 4,500 km!
Could the signal bounce off airplanes as well, or is that effect not relevant in practice? (I think I've heard such stories before from radio amateurs...)
It can bounce off of meteor trails or the moon. It's been done many times in the ham community. Signals do bounce off of aircraft too, there are even passive military radars that track airborne objects using DVB-T or other strong signal reflections. It could be used if the conditions are just right.
All of this has really nothing to do with LoRa and everything to do with physical properties of the emissions (frequency, power, polarization) and physical properties of whatever happens to exist in the world at the time.
Yes, of course this is related to the physical properties of the emissions, but LoRa uses specific frequencies of the ISM band (868 MHz in Europe), and this discussion was about the reasons why that specific LoRa transmission worked even though there wasn't a line of sight. Airplanes could be an explanation, although your sibling comment thinks there isn't sufficient transmission power for it to be feasible.
The path loss for moonbounce is approximately 390 dB. You're not doing that by accident. In addition to using weak signal modes, you'll need directional antennas and lots of power to overcome that.
It's not that high. You have to use the radar equation with the moon being a very lossy but huge target cross section. The path loss at 432 MHz and average moon distance of 384,400 km is 261.6 dB.
Would it be closer to the other value if you factored in the atmosphere, and whatever else is in the way?
As an aside, would radio via the moon ever be practical? Without pumping out so much transmit power that you pick up the signal anyway, without pointing a receiver at the moon. I think it would be neat, if only for the sake of novelty.
No, there's very little loss from the atmosphere at 432 MHz. The 390 dB figure is a misunderstanding of how the path loss is calculated. The poster "wl" took the one way path loss (195 dB) and doubled it. But the moon is a huge reflector and provides "gain".
Here's a C program with the correct equation.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
double d, f, lambda, loss;
if (argc != 3) {
fprintf(stderr, "usage: moon <km> <frequency(MHz)>\n");
exit(-1);
}
d = atof(argv[1]) * 1000.0;
f = atof(argv[2]);
lambda = 299792458.0 / (f * 1000000.0);
loss = (0.065 * (1.738e6 * 1.738e6) * (lambda * lambda)) / (631.65468167 * (d * d * d * d));
printf("EME path loss = %f dB\n", 10 * log10(loss));
return 0;
}
1.738e6 is the radius of the moon in meters and 0.065 is the reflection efficiency.
Just to expand upon this, tropospheric propagation happens typically where there is a temperature inversion, meaning, air near the surface is cooler than higher up in altitude. That warmer air aloft acts as a layer that radio waves bounce off of.
this means about 292 bits-per-second transmission rate for the packet. But I'm unsure if this is correct.
How hard would it have been to put that in the post? I feel like there is some conspiracy to never talk about bitrates/transfer rates in the LoRa world. Like, ever.
Just say it. It helps people understand what this tech is for.
Good point. We'll add that to the next post if there is a new record. Also what can be confusing is that the business viable part is even much smaller than the technical viable part. The low power operations is really only at lower SF7 or SF8. And we push our partners and ecosystem to keep the payload as small as possible as every byte counts. It is a completely different way of thinking than WiFi or cellular. Yet I do agree it is presented with the same terms and paradigm and that is confusing.
On that point, have you looked at Myriota's research? (https://myriota.com/) In developing their system they went right back to the fundamentals and reworked everything around the idea of short messages. For example, an implicit assumption in the Shannon bound is that the message length is long, so they figured out that their short message system doesn't obey the Shannon bound and designed the coding and so on accordingly. It's fascinating stuff if you're into information theory.
Yeah we now support 1.5M devices with our community network and enterprise network. And the most successful ones sent the least amount of data. Here is a list of all the supported devices: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/device-repository/
So I know LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models and Using LoRA for Efficient Stable Diffusion Fine-Tuning. But from the text, I don't think this is about it? It seems it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
WSPR is very different than LoRa. WSPR is usually used at HF, and has very low bandwidth. LoRa is used at UHF frequencies, and has very wide bandwidth, as it's a spread spectrum modulation scheme.
There's more differences but those are the ones relevant to this discussion.
138 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
Literal-minded people are an endless source of joy.
They're referring to this:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685
I've had a plan to blanket my city (Vienna) with LoRa and create my own local Internet, wiring up only retro computers .. seems like its time to break out the ol' lunchboxes and get cracking.
Who knows, maybe we will have a retro- net up and running in the next few days ..
No, to be honest: Very impressive. It's kind of a "dream" of me, to bring Internet to the river/picknick area two kilometers away from me. LoRa would probably be the way to go, will have to look further into that.
For some reason, I don't find LoRaWan at all alluring. As far as I can tell, in the end it's in the hands of one company and that really defeats the spirit for me. I mostly just use LoRa for point-to-point connections with my own shitty networking stack.
(For those that don't know duty cycle limitations: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/duty-cycle/)
(Fwiw I wasn't the one who downvoted but thought it'd be worth mentioning)
Or just you know, use the 4G that is probably there already.
Yeah... Projects like open WiFi are probably becoming less and less useful, as everybody is carrying 4G/5G modems in their pocket.
A different, low resolution internet basically. But LoRA is too slow for a lot of things. Too.
Still nice.
> marketing bodies
There you go.
There isn't any opensource modulation scheme that comes even close to LoRa.
Not until it becomes widespread. For-profit companies are not charities and they patent things for a reason.
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...
I agree that it would be better if they were up front with their affiliation, but hiding it (astroturfing) is not the same as not divulging.
Similar stuff is happening on Wikipedia, read the talk page there (and the LoRa page) to see what I'm getting at.
Why not just flag and move on.
People don't need to disclose who they are when submitting things to HN.
Hell, I used to have a pretty comprehensive bio, until I replaced it with an icloud relay email because random internet people would look me up outside HN and try to dig up stuff to use as ammo in response to comments I posted that they disagreed with.
HN can be a nasty place. I don't fault anyone for hiding their identity.
Companies aren't people. That's one of those things I just don't subscribe to. If you are the CEO of a company and you are engaging in what can only be termed as marketing activities, effectively advertising your company I think you should be up front about that. Otherwise you can no longer see the difference between organic interest in a technology and marketing push, which are two entirely different things.
I would agree with you if it was a garbage press release with low quality fake comments.
Maybe there’s some niche politics that I’m unaware of in the LoRa space that is triggering.
And maybe I'm over protective of HN.
> I would agree with you if it was a garbage press release with low quality fake comments.
You mean like the one where the CEO (then still anonymously) tried to devalue a point made by a commenter here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416457
> Maybe there’s some niche politics that I’m unaware of in the LoRa space that is triggering.
Not that I'm aware of, but their WP talk page is pretty clear about them abusing WP for marketing purposes and that doesn't give them the benefit of the doubt with me when interacting with HN in this way, besides that the initial votes were so fast that I doubt that it was organic. But when dang wakes up I'm sure he'll be able to rule that out or confirm it. For all I know it is all legit but it certainly looked weird. Also note how the CTO nicely disclosed who he was but the CEO did not well after joining the thread until prompted to do so. Which makes me suspect this is a bit more organized than it may seem at first glance, but then again, that's not my call to make.
It's well possible that this was really an innocent accident, but it would have looked better if something like this engagement post was posted by the same account as the original link.
But fair enough, thanks for the profile update.
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread
Feels like it fits exactly my understanding? Not company vs person/project, but press release/announcement vs something to play with, something easily accessible and tryable, detailed?? And it goes much further that it must be something like this.. and no mention at all that this is the necessary disclosure if this is your article, newsletter or similar.... this one here definitely not a "Show HN"!
But the original name for that is EME for Earth-Moon-Earth. Radio amateurs have been doing this for decades, it's a fun thing to try.
To be clear, that's fine! This is definitely interesting content, and companies with genuinely interesting things to share should share them directly, that's great. I can't speak for the wikipedia behaviour, but I think complaining about this post is unreasonable.
As for whether or not this is fine: yes, it's fine. "Show HN: We reached a new RF distance record with LoRa" from an account associated with the company.
It's a link to a blog on the company site, linked by someone whose profile clearly discloses they're CEO of the company. (though based on comments below, the disclosure in profile might be an hour more recent than the post itself).
Personally, I find this interesting, on-topic, and (after the profile edit, if any) totally fine.
It's obvious to me because (1) I'm aware of the company, (2) know that there have been issues with their WP entries in the past (and still are, they are essentially marketing copy), and finally (3) because it just so happens that the company is Dutch and I keep an eye on the local eco-system. But it probably wasn't that obvious to you.
These guys have nice tech, but they are working the web in a way that doesn't sit right with me. If you're ok with this then no problem, let's see how you feel when HN and WP are overrun by advertising that masquerades as organic postings.
I follow TTN (and Helium), have a TTN gateway plugged in, and a dozen or so LoRa dev boards sitting around (two are within reach, albeit buried under some dust of recent disuse).
I find the LoRa tech interesting in general and a new RF distance record specifically interesting, whether it's on the TTN blog, the Helium site, on an Andreas Spiess video, or elsewhere. It sounds like you have some relevant history with the company's behavior that is shaping your opinion of their action here. We perceive their action here differently as a result.
> 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.
At this distance you need a 130km-high tower for line of sight due to earth’s curvature. The previous record was set on a balloon flying at 38km height. LoRa uses high frequencies so shouldn’t benefit from the ground effect?
On VHF/UHF it's usually atmospheric ducting where radio signals are getting reflected between two layers of air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOwbNUpDQA&list=PL3XBzmAj53...
ExpressLRS has taken everything by storm, partly because it's a well-governed open source project, and it manages to innovate many times faster than the old companies manage to fix bugs in their own products.
However sometimes you can get Troposheric propagation on these high frequency bands. This used to be common when I was a teenager living in the south of England in Kent and we could occasionally receive racy TV channels from Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation
From wikipedia:
> Tropospheric propagated signals travel in the part of the atmosphere adjacent to the surface and extending to some 25,000 feet (8 km). Such signals are thus directly affected by weather conditions extending over some hundreds of miles. During very settled, warm anticyclonic weather (i.e., high pressure), usually weak signals from distant transmitters improve in strength.
Radio Amateurs love this kind of propagation. It is very variable, doesn't last long, but can give you contacts over great distances on frequencies which are usually line of sight. I think the record for radio amateurs on the 70 cm band (430-440 MHz) is over 4,500 km!
All of this has really nothing to do with LoRa and everything to do with physical properties of the emissions (frequency, power, polarization) and physical properties of whatever happens to exist in the world at the time.
As an aside, would radio via the moon ever be practical? Without pumping out so much transmit power that you pick up the signal anyway, without pointing a receiver at the moon. I think it would be neat, if only for the sake of novelty.
Here's a C program with the correct equation.
1.738e6 is the radius of the moon in meters and 0.065 is the reflection efficiency.Satellites make moonbounce impracticable.
No, LoRa can run on two bands in Europe, either EU433 from 433.05 to 434.79 MHz or EU863 from 863 to 870 MHz.
See e.g., https://www.everythingrf.com/community/lora-frequency-in-eur... or https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/is-there-an-agreed-... or for a more dense, but definitive source https://docdb.cept.org/download/4316 ("EUROPEAN TABLE OF FREQUENCY ALLOCATIONS AND APPLICATIONS IN THE FREQUENCY RANGE 8.3 kHz to 3000 GHz (ECA TABLE")
Albeit I'm not sure what band they used here.
From what I gather, the map says a "SF:12" which means a spread factor of 12, at a bandwidth of 125khz. With a code rate of '1' according to https://www.rfwireless-world.com/calculators/LoRa-Data-Rate-...
this means about 292 bits-per-second transmission rate for the packet. But I'm unsure if this is correct.
How hard would it have been to put that in the post? I feel like there is some conspiracy to never talk about bitrates/transfer rates in the LoRa world. Like, ever.
Just say it. It helps people understand what this tech is for.
On that point, have you looked at Myriota's research? (https://myriota.com/) In developing their system they went right back to the fundamentals and reworked everything around the idea of short messages. For example, an implicit assumption in the Shannon bound is that the message length is long, so they figured out that their short message system doesn't obey the Shannon bound and designed the coding and so on accordingly. It's fascinating stuff if you're into information theory.
maybe not mentioning the bitrate discourages misappropriation?
There's more differences but those are the ones relevant to this discussion.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160094269A1/en
1. How to increase range: https://community.emlid.com/t/increasing-lora-s-range/32597
2. LoRA repeater: https://hackaday.com/2019/05/02/simple-self-contained-lora-r...
3. High altitude LoRA receive-transmit: https://www.daveakerman.com/?p=2828