Using LoRa for local fleet tracking

mzimmers
Mon, 25 Mar 2024 16:20:35 +0000
How to get started

Hi all -

I hope I chose the right forum for this topic; if not, hopefully one of the mods will move my post.

I’m a part-time marshal at a golf resort. We currently use a system for monitoring the location of players on the course. The system makes heavy use of cellular data transmission, cloud communication and other complexities that make it expensive and often laggy. I’m exploring options for building a new system for this.

My question is, does LoRa seem appropriate for an application like this? The bandwidth need is quite low – each “tag” (a device placed on a golf cart or bag) only needs to submit location data say, once or twice a minute. Needed range would be about a mile. Battery life is not a barrier (the stuff we use today dies during the middle of the day as often as not).

Ideally, I’d like an edge device that reports back directly to a computer in the pro shop, where the data can be read and displayed by a dedicated application. I see no need to go to the cloud or any external WAN for this. Is this feasible, or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Thanks for any input. I do look forward to this application.

7 posts - 4 participants