Long Range Lora Antenna From Paradar - This is huge!

[Music] hi and welcome back to another tech Minds video now over the years I've experimented with Laura uper 8868 MHz ranging from Laura one to credit card size trackers to mesh tastic the off-grid messaging system that is currently the in thing now having a good antenna is one of the most important parts of the system because we're dealing with such low power around 22 dbm and such high frequencies so setting up a homebased station for Laura has to be planned and depending on your budget available real estate for mounting antennas and the equipment used will factor in how well your system performs now due to the low power and high frequencies it's not uncommon for most people to install the electronics of a low node at the base of the antenna now this cuts down on signal loss in lengthy CarX but there is a way around this if you don't want to mount the electronics parts at the base of the antenna and have the equipment indoors and that's to use a high gain antenna and extremely low loss coax both of which can be expensive especially the coax cable but believe me it will be worth the extra money for the performance you will obtain I searching around the internet for a suitable homebased Laura antenna I was drawn to parad now they make antennas specifically designed for Laura amongst other antennas now the topof the range omnidirectional Laura antenna comes in at around 110 British pound but it offers a 360° radio plot and it has a massive 11.5 DBI of gain now to achieve these figures the antenna is actually 220 cm in length so it's not the smallest of antennas but big is better right for me I wanted to run the coax into my office room because I'll use the antenna for all sorts of Laura projects not just mesh tastic so having a node mounted at the base of the antenna would be a pain in the rear end because well I don't do ladders now parad have a few options when it comes to Cox they have their own x400 ultra low loss coax which comes in a range of pre-term ated length as 3 5 10 and 15 M now of course if you're going down this route with pre-terminated connectors on the end of the coax I would recommend only purchasing the length that you actually need even with the expensive low loss coax you will still see some loss of signal now parad also have the option to purchase LMR 400 which is slightly more expensive but the loss at 868 MHz is a bit less meaning more of your 100 m Laura signal will be getting to the antenna now parile also sell all of the adapters and Cox patch cables that you'll need to go between your Laura nodes and antenna connections if you need them now one other item that I needed was some self amalgamating tape which parad also sell now it will become apparent why this is an important part needed in a moment now once the antenna arrived I noticed that it comes in two parts I guess shipping a two .2 M antenna is not really ideal but it's not a huge issue as they simply screw together now the bracket at the bottom which is used to attach the antenna to a mous needs to be fitted like this now the connector on the bottom of the antenna is an N type female so make sure whatever Cox you use will have the end type male plug on the end of it now attaching the halfes of the antenna is fairly simple they just screw together like this now just make sure you get get it Square on tightening it up to avoid damaging those threads and once it's tightly screwed together is when we'll need that self amalgamating tape Now using a good helping of this tape ensures that no water Ingress happens over time now the last thing we want to happen is to have the antenna installed 30 ft up in the air and for the antenna's performance to deteriorate due to water Ingress into that Center joint using the self amalgamating tape will ensure that water stays out now once you fitted the carrot cable to the bottom of the antenna I would also recommend applying some of that tape here too it just provides Extra Protection and ensures your antenna will stay working for years to come without the need to take it down and clean or service it now I really wanted to get the base of the antenna above the roof line but in order to do that on a separate mask meant using far more CarX than I wanted to plus the extra cost for another master and mounting bracket so I decided to use my existing MK with what is called a cranked MK now here we could push the antenna up as high as possible and then have the new coax for the parad antenna coming down the M into my office using a little bit less coax now I don't like heights and you'd never catch me up on some ladders let alone on the roof of a house so with a friend of mine from AP Aerials he done all the hard work and installed the antenna on the mask now luckily it wasn't that heavy and carrying it up the mass and attaching to the existing Mass was actually relatively easy well for me it was because I was on the ground looking up now I was concerned about the antenna being so close to my other triband vertical antenna but since it's been installed I've not seen any performance issues and the SWR and both antennas were to be expected and were exactly the same so here it is the parad 11.5 DBI vertical antenna which stands at 2 20 cm tall and doesn't look too bad in my opinion and it's as high as I wanted it to be so back inside with the CarX fed through the wall I wanted to check the SWR using my network analyzer and here we can see a lovely SWR plot and it's around 1.1 at 868 MHz now I don't think we can get any better than that you also notice that it's quite broadbanded meaning that it has a little bit of give either side of the 868 MHz now out of Interest I wanted to see what the band activity was like so I hooked up my rspdx SDR receiver from SDR play and looked around 868 MHz now we can clearly see there's quite a lot going on here and not all of this looks like Laura but every now and again you can see the Laura packets and they're very fast and very wide so what will this connect to well this is the node that I've made which will connect permanently to this parad antenna it's a t- beam Supreme slightly taken apart to fit into this box now it has an 18650 battery as a backup and it's powered via USB luckily the battery gets charged while the USB is plugged into my USB hub meaning if I turn off the computer in my office then the node stays on the T beam Supreme is running the latest version of mesh tastic and this will be the main reason for installing this antenna we taking a quick look on the map for any dedicated nodes we can see some as far away as dunable downs and Bedford and that's roughly around 25 km away now I don't live in a particularly high point and I do have some hills around me so having the best antenna I can get hold of and as high as I can get it gives me a Fighting Chance of receiving some half decent lur signals now I did also get another antenna from parad and that's this this is the 12.5 DBI a element yagi for 868 MHz now yagis are directional antennas so basically you point them in the direction you want to transmit and receive now I'll be showing this in more detail in an upcoming video now I'll leave some links below if you want to check out any of these products that I've shown in the video anyway until the next video take care stay safe thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video [Music]

Channel: Tech Minds

Views: 30,320

Keywords: 11.5dBi Vertical Antenna, High Gain Vertical Antennae, LoRaWAN Antenna, Outdoor LoRa Antenna, Paradar 11.5dBi Antenna, Vertical LoRa Antenna, LoRa Range Extender, Long Range Lora Antenna From Paradar, long range antenna for lora, long range antenna for meshtastic, iot antenna, best iot antenna, omni-directional lora antenna

Id: zkP5VSi2k5g

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024