LoRaWAN® Soil Moisture & Temperature Sensor

Place the probe in the active root zone — commonly around 15 cm deep for row crops and about 5 cm to the side of a drip emitter, deeper for tree crops. Many growers add a second sensor below the root zone to see whether water is draining past the roots. Allow 10 to 14 days after installation for the soil to re-consolidate around the probe before using the readings to schedule irrigation.

The MacSync LSS X2 probe is 85 mm long and machined from stainless steel, rated IP68 for permanent burial. It connects to the sensor unit on a standard 1 metre cable, so the probe sits in the root zone while the radio and battery stay above ground; longer IP68 cable extenders are available for deeper placements. Seat the full 85 mm against undisturbed soil and backfill firmly so no air gaps remain around it.

VWC is the proportion of a soil volume that is water — 25% VWC means a quarter of that soil volume is water. It is the measurement irrigation scheduling actually uses, because it tells you how much water is available to the roots. The MacSync LSS X2 measures 0–100% VWC to ±3% accuracy between 0 and 53% VWC.

The MacSync LSS X2 runs 7+ years on its 19 Ah Li-SOCl₂ cell at hourly reporting, about 4 years at 15-minute reporting, and roughly 2 years at 5-minute reporting. For sites that need frequent readings indefinitely, the solar variant pairs a 20 W panel with an 8000 mAh rechargeable battery.

Yes. It uses capacitive sensing with no exposed electrodes, so it stays stable in clay, sandy and red soils, in cocopeat and greenhouse media, and in saline ground where conductive probes tend to drift or corrode.

Yes — LoRaWAN sensors report through a gateway, but you only need one for a very large area. A single gateway typically covers an entire farm, plantation or orchard, and Macnman supplies both indoor and outdoor LoRaWAN gateways if you do not already have coverage.

It works with The Things Network (TTN), ChirpStack, MQTT platforms, Orbiwise, Netmore and private on-premise LoRaWAN servers. It supports LoRaWAN® v1.0.4, Class A by default with Class C configurable, OTAA activation and AES-128 encryption.

Soil temperature is measured to ±0.5 °C across a −40 °C to +80 °C range, with response in under 10 seconds — accurate enough for germination windows, frost-risk alerts and root-zone temperature studies.

Yes. Configure soil moisture and temperature thresholds in the Maya app and the sensor sends an immediate uplink when the root zone crosses one. Your platform or irrigation controller acts on that event, so valves open on soil condition rather than on a timer.

It depends on how uniform the field is. A common starting point is one sensor per irrigation zone or management block, placed in a representative spot, with additional sensors where soil type, slope or crop stage differ. Because one gateway serves many sensors, adding more points costs only the sensor.

Pair over Bluetooth with the free Macnman Maya Android app to set uplink interval, sampling rate, reporting mode and thresholds — no laptop needed. Devices already in the field can be reconfigured over the air with downlink commands, and firmware updates are signed.

Yes. It performs in cocopeat and other growing media as well as field soil, and the battery variant suits covered structures where a solar panel would see little light. Threshold alerts are commonly used to protect high-value crops from both dry-down and over-watering.

Five: solar-powered and battery-powered versions on LoRaWAN® (SKUs 8805 and 8806), the same two on Macnman's MacTalk device-to-device protocol (8807 and 8808), and a BLE variant for local monitoring and commissioning (8809).