Long range WAN development kits aid IoT design

It is ideal for applications including sensor circuits/networks, security systems, smart home, smart metering, industrial control and smart cities.

The four new LoRaWAN evaluation modules feature Semtech’s advanced long-range LoRa technology, making them ideal for LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) specifications for battery-operated IoT networks and applications, as well as enabling connection to LoRaWAN gateways.

LoRa is also the primary protocol adopted by ‘The Things Network’, which oversaw the crowdsourcing of a complete citywide IoT data network in Amsterdam.

LoRaWAN provides a common protocol allowing smart assets and IoT devices to communicate with one another.

The LoRaWAN specification is also optimised for very low power use, which makes it perfect for wireless battery-powered end-points in an IoT network.

It can securely deliver two-way communication at data rates from 0.3 to 50kbps, and distances of up to 2 to 5km in an urban environment and up to 15km in a suburban environment.

Semtech's LoRa modulation is a derivative of chirp-spread-spectrum (CSS) encoding technology, which uses the entire allocated bandwidth to broadcast a signal, spreading the signal across a broader band of spectrum.

This means the system can be made to operate even over a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), providing LoRaWAN with high robustness to channel noise.

The Semtech LoRaWAN development kits all employ the on-board SX1272/6 RF transceivers, which offers wide area communication with extreme tolerance of interference, and PE4259 UltraCMOS RF antenna switches from Peregrine Semiconductor.

Kit options include: 868MHz ISM band; radio-frequency-development-kits/9225873/ 169/868MHz dual-band; radio-frequency-development-kits/9225885/ 433/868MHz dual-band; and finally a 433/868MHz dual-band transceiver evaluation module that comes in the mbed Shield format.