A Rainy Day & The Business of LoRaWAN

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Welcome to the business of LoRaWAN,

where we dive into this long

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range, low power, wide area network

and its impact on your bottom line.

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The latest sensors and proven real world

solutions.

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I'm your host, Nik Hawks.

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Since 2020,

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when I stumbled into LoRaWAN via Helium

while hunting for a lost paraglider,

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I've helped thousands

understand how it works and how to use it,

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and I'm psyched to do the same for you.

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I've installed everything

from soil sensors

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to weather stations to retail foot

traffic counters.

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Coming to the conclusion

that LoRaWAN is rad.

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So I built the only show on the internet

fully dedicated to unlocking its potential

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for your business.

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Let's dig in.

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It's a rainy morning

where I live in Southern California.

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The rain is unusual for a desert next

to the sea.

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With an average annual

rainfall of just ten inches, about 25cm.

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For anyone listening,

it's easy to know when it's raining.

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You go outside and feel it,

or you look outside and see it.

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What's harder to know

is the impact of the rain.

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What changes in traffic

does rain cause in San Diego

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as people drive to work or people

later on rainy days?

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Does productivity go down

or does it go up because they stay inside?

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How much less should the local farmers

water because of the rain?

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San Diego County has more farms

than any other county in America.

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And water use is critical here.

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What happens at the airport

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are the runway conditions change

so that pilots need to be alerted?

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Is it windier than normal

as the front rolls through?

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Has the wind direction switched?

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What about the Port of San Diego

with a local economic impact of almost $14

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billion?

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Does rain slow down operations

as less tourists stroll in our parks

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when it's wet?

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At our shipping container terminal,

which handles about 2.5

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million tons of cargo a year.

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Are they slower to load or unload

when it rains?

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All these are impacts of rain here

in my little corner of the world,

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and none of them can be known

without being measured.

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Sticking a wet finger into the wind

is romantic and awesome in old school,

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but the information gathered

is subjective,

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and it's stuck

in the brain of the finger sticker.

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This brings us to the first

part of the reason this podcast exists,

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which is the world of IoT

or Internet of Things in general.

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IoT devices are sensors that measure

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what we'd like to know

and send that information to the internet.

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How much rain has fallen?

Which direction is the wind?

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How much traffic is on the roads?

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How many people are walking

by a tourist attraction?

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How much cargo is loaded

and where are the containers?

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And so on and on.

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IoT has millions of applications,

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but the easiest way to think of IoT

in the biggest sense is as a layer

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of previously unmeasured information that

opens up our understanding of the world.

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Now, gathering

the information is the first part.

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And for that, you can use weather stations

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and people counters and vehicle trackers,

or any one of hundreds of sensors.

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Getting that information to the internet

and getting it there reliably and cheaply

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is the second part.

That's where LoRaWAN comes in

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and exploring

LoRaWAN is why I built this show.

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LoRaWAN stands for Long Range

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Wide Area network Lora

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Wan, and it's a way to send

all of the small bits of data

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collected by an IoT device

wirelessly, over very long distances.

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How long?

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Let's start with what you're familiar

with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

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If you were to use Bluetooth,

you could send information about 30ft.

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If you wanted to send via Wi-Fi,

you could send it about 300ft.

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A packet of information sent on a low

end system has gone

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as far as 830 miles.

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Now that's the world record for LoRaWAN

and by no means routine.

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What is routine, however, is to send data

a couple of miles in urban environments

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and tens of miles with a clear

line of sight out in the country on a farm

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or a cattle ranch

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that comes with the trade off.

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You're not sending very much data,

certainly not photos or video.

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This is more like what you could type

in five seconds or less.

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How much rain has fallen?

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What the wind direction

is, the grid coordinates

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of a tracking device,

or whether or not a valve is on or off.

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You're also not sending that data

in a real time second by second stream.

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A LoRaWAN is what's called an LP

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when for low power, wide area network

and sending data and a constant stream

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every second or even

every minute is not a low power endeavor.

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The sweet spot for LoRaWAN

is sending these small packets of data

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at intervals of about ten minutes or more,

and being able to maintain

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that for years,

in some cases up to a decade.

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You'll hear in future shows discussions

about how long LoRaWAN sensors will last

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and how infrequently batteries, usually

just a couple of days, need to be changed.

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This brings us to the next aspect

of a LoRaWAN system,

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which is how easy it is to deploy

when you understand the technology,

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because the devices are long

range wireless and mostly battery powered.

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Gathering information from a new source

is as easy as adding a weather station

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to a pull outside,

or slapping a sensor on the wall

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to collect the CO2 levels in a room,

or sticking a sensor

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on the casing of a generator

to measure heat and vibration.

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Turning that into a health check

for the generator, with no need to attach

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any wires or figure out how to speak

generator computer language.

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If it's getting too hot or vibrating

too much, or in an odd pattern,

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you know to check it out.

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This makes it easy to deploy

an enormous amount of sensors.

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Which brings us

to the next advantage of law.

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When the ability

for one wireless collection point

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called a gateway to receive information

from thousands of sensors, unlike Wi-Fi,

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which we've all experienced, is slowing

way down at a crowded airport.

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Wi-Fi gets overloaded at 50 devices or so.

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A single LoRaWAN gateway

can handle the data streams of up to a

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thousand IoT devices.

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As you'll hear from guests in upcoming

shows,

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it's not uncommon to roll out a LoRaWAN

covering an entire country

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and to deploy thousands of sensors

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that collect information

on an hourly basis for years

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from the temperature inside a housing

unit, where Dean Marsh will tell us all

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about the time that probably saved

the life of an old man.

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To Vasya at Torch, who will tell us all

about sensors that can detect wildfires

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when they're campfire sized,

and transmit that information immediately.

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So we don't need an air tanker

to put it out.

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We'll be talking to a wide swath of people

in the LoRaWAN ecosystem,

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from hardware companies

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building the next generation of sensors

to deploy, installing them to CFOs

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who've used LoRaWAN at their company

to drive informed bottom line decisions.

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Some of it will be technical, but most of

it will be stories backed by numbers.

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To help you make the best decisions

regarding LoRaWAN in your business.

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My goal here is to help grow

the entire LoRaWAN ecosystem,

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serving as a trusted and reliable

point of information about LoRaWAN.

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For those of us who haven't had time

to read the manual yet, but could use this

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fascinating technology

to improve our lives and business.

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Thanks so much for listening.

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I can't wait to build and share

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an extraordinarily useful library

of LoRaWAN information for you.

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That's it for the business of LoRaWAN.

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Thanks for listening.

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If you enjoyed the show

and want to learn more,

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the podcast home on the Web

is metsci.show.

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That's.

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M-E-T-S-C-I dot SHOW.

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There you'll find calculators to estimate

the impact of IoT usage on your business.

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Be able to make guest suggestions.

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If you know someone who you think

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should come on the show

and easily get in touch with me.

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If you think the show is useful

for LoRaWAN, please leave a review

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wherever you listen to this.

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Ratings

interviews really help podcast grow.

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Finally, an enormous

thanks to our sponsor, the IoT

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working Group at the Helium Foundation,

for supporting this show.

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If you want to try one out for yourself

without asking anyone permission,

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you can sign up for a meteoscientific

account at console.meteoscientific.com

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and get your first 400 data credits

for free.

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That's enough to run a sensor

for about a year.

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If you're sensing once a day. Right

on. See you on the next show.