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+title: ROOPHLOCH 2024 Post 2 - LoRa transmission
+date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 19:50:07 +0200
+author: -fab- <fab@redterminal.org>
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<== ROOPHLOCH'24 Post 2 ==>
Because I was a little unsatisfied with my standard setup for
outdoor communication (Laptop/Smartphone Hotspot), I come up with
this second ROOPHLOCH post, this time on my Gopher hole.
<== LoRa Transmission ==>
This time I send my ROOPHLOCH post from a family park near the
southern end of Norf. I'm sitting on a bench under the shadow of
some trees. I tried at first to send from the academic high school
here in Norf but it seems to be too far away (yet) (~840m). The
line distance is according to google maps ~247m meters. I need to
install some better antennas and position them a little better on
my balcony.
I've set up 2 USB-LoRa (Long Range Transmission) devices, one on a
Raspberry Pi 3 at my home on my balcony and one on my laptop on my
way. I wrote two little Perl scripts and one shell script,
"lora_receive.pl" which runs on the Raspberry Pi and receives the
file, and "lora_send.pl" which runs on my laptop and gzips,
encrypts and does a base64 on the file and then sends it. After
transmission the lora_receive.pl script decrypts and gunzips the
file. Then it pipes the content to the "auto_create_phlog_entry.sh"
shell script which prepares it and puts it in my phlog directory,
builds the gophermap and rss feed and then sends the phlog diff
to my Gopher server with rsync, so it should be published
automatically.
I chose two simple USB-LoRa-Adapters which don't support LoRaWAN,
so I can "circumvent" the LoRaWAN restrictions :).
These are my first tries with LoRa, so I'll try how far I can push
this in future. The USB-LoRa sticks should have a maximum reach of
~5km under ideal conditions. Although I'm only 247m away from the
home station I should be able to go further away. I just need
better antennas. The other main obstacle for this is the walking. I
have to do this all by foot which I'm not good on at the moment.
<== The scripts ==>
I'll push a git repository to my account on Codeberg.org with the
scripts and make a follow up post on Gemini with the Link. They are
a little messy because I hardcoded some paths. I'll work on that in
the future. They're also very brittle mainly because I don't check
the inputs, but they work if used correctly.
<== BTW: My site turns three years old this month ==>
On 12th of September in 2021 I posted my first Gemlog post on my
site. It was just the first "About" page but nonetheless. A lot has
changed since then. I moved from the 'foobucket.xyz' domain to
'redterminal.org' in 2023, and I added a Gopher Hole and a Finger
server in January'24. A lot of Gemlog and Gopher posts were added
since and I'm still tinkering around with my site.
<== Going on with my walk ==>
This time I won't go to "Le Petit Cafe" after my transmission
because it's in the other direction, and as I told you before, I'm
not good on my feet. I think I'll go home directly after that and
if all goes well I'll celebrate this little success with a hot cup
of coffee! :)