Having gained some experience with my weather station project described in the APRS LoRa weather station article, and having a few LoRa RFM95W modules, I decided to carry out a feasibility test for a very low-power mini weather station.

The initial results were very encouraging, so I continued my project until I had a mature design.

Lilygo LoRa modules from Lilygo are advertised to provide a power output of +20dBm (100mW).
Having had a module that looked suspicious, I was faced with the problem of measuring power.
Measuring the power of a fugitive signal such as LoRa is not always easy.

So I wrote a little script that makes it easy.
I also wrote a second script to test reception sensitivity.

I found that none of my modules reached the advertised power, which was more like +17dBm.

 This article is no longer relevant. The software has evolved considerably and no longer requires programming.
This is done online via a Web interface. It does, however, provide some interesting informations.

CD2RXU's LoRa APRS Tracker software is a fork of OE5BPA's, to which he has added functionalities.
It brings several improvements over the original software, including :
- a menu offering a choice of functions
- choice of different callsigns (and icons, e.g. TK5EP-9 car, TK5EP-7 runner, etc.)
- the ability to view the reception of other Trackers
- reduced power consumption by lowering CPU speed
- compression of transmitted data to reduce transmission time, thus reducing power consumption and improving reception immunity
- local weather report request, etc...
To take advantage of certain functionalities, you also need to use his iGate software.