I recently discovered Meshtastic, the open-source community project for LoRa radio communications. It got me wondering if it could be used to link to a remote PiAware somewhere remote and high up, out of range of wifi or ethernet, but within range of a LoRa link. Someone else in here floated the idea six years ago.
I looked into it more and it looks like it’s a non-starter for something like PiAware. That’s because the radio bands used by LoRa are subject to rules and regulations regarding time on air or available data rates, depending on the region.
Even if it was possible, the latency of tens to hundreds of milliseconds for the radio part, and a bit extra for moving between LoRa and the network, might make it impractical, and certainly rule out MLAT contributions.
Has anyone else explored any ADS-B related angles for this technology? Here is a white paper exploring the use of LoRa to mitigate attacks on ADS-B using an SX1280 radio module.
Here’s a good video showing off Meshtastic and a couple of cheap ESP32 microcontroller-based devices. Andy’s channel is also very interesting for all things radio and probably of interest to people who are into ADS-B tracking. He’s based in the UK.
For a great deep dive into Meshtastic and how everything fits together, this video series (and the Advanced video series) are excellent tutorials. They’re by The Comms Channel. He’s based in the US.