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SuperMouse 5 hours ago

I'm currently thinkering of building a balloon with a 2.4GHz LoRa transmitter (SX128x) and a low-power STM32U microcontroller.

Why?

- You can repurpose 2.4GHz Wifi gear opening many doors

- You can easily include volunteers dumping data from HF into a IP sink for telemetry. TTGO offers boards with 2.4GHz LoRa.

- Theoretically you still can add a "low rate" 868MHz/433MHz and a "high rate" 2.4GHz for transmitting pictures and other stuff more quickly.

- BOM friendly. As the balloon might get lost you have to plan a bit for costs.

iberator 4 hours ago | parent [-]

lol. WPRS works like 10.000km per WATT on HF. You can't do it with 2.4ghz.

Ham radio basics

ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why do they do WSPR on HF and not 2.4GHz?

What's the important part that defines what kind of range you can get?

maccam912 an hour ago | parent [-]

WSPR on HF makes sense down here on the surface of the planet because certain ranges of frequencies (not the same range always, but generally always within HF) can bounce off of upper atmosphere layers and pinball back and forth to get signals to someone or from someone who couldn't be seen line-of-sight because of the curvature of the Earth. For line of sight work, the 2.4GHz in theory would work as well as anything, but another trick WSPR has is that it doesn't allow for arbitrary data to be sent. Sender and receiver encode the limited information in an agreed-upon way and then it takes a long time, like minutes, to send that little bit of data. Very high redundancy.

ErroneousBosh an hour ago | parent [-]

You know that and I know that, it was a Socratic question aimed at OP ;-)

In the olden days we did QRSS, FSK Morse with a dot rate in the order of minutes.

SuperMouse 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

lol. 10.000km with a few bits of fixed-structure payload you mean.

Encoding basics