LoRaWAN Sensors

A LoRaWAN sensor is a battery-powered device that measures a physical quantity — temperature, soil moisture, a tank level, parking occupancy — and sends the reading over the LoRaWAN radio protocol to a gateway, which forwards it to a network server and your dashboard. The radio is long-range and low-power, so one gateway serves a whole site and each sensor runs for years on an internal battery.

Kilometres in open terrain and hundreds of metres indoors, depending on terrain, antenna height and the spreading factor. Macnman's field measurements give best-case ranges of roughly 1 km in dense urban areas, 2 km urban, 3.5 km suburban and 8 km in open country. The free LoRaWAN gateway and coverage calculator on this site estimates range and gateway count for a specific site.

Years, and how many depends mostly on how often the sensor reports. The parking sensor is rated for 5 to 10 years, and sensors on the 19 Ah cell typically run several years at 15-minute to hourly uplinks. The LoRaWAN battery life calculator on this site works it out for your interval, payload and spreading factor.

Yes. LoRaWAN sensors report through a gateway, but one gateway covers a large area, so most sites need only one or two. Macnman makes the Setu X1 indoor gateway and the MacLink Gen-2 outdoor gateway, and the sensors also join existing networks such as The Things Network.

IN865, the licence-free 865–867 MHz band. Macnman's sensors are WPC compliant for India and are also supplied on EU868, US915, AU915, AS923, KR920 and RU864 for other regions.

ChirpStack, The Things Network, Orbiwise, Netmore and private on-premise network servers, with data forwarded over MQTT or HTTPS to your own platform. Payload decoders are published in the documentation for each sensor.