2026-06-25 –, Prime Dome
LoRA has been a significant force within the low-power, long-range radio space, enabling many protocols built on top from Reticulum to Meshtastic. But, the underlying protocol has some major shortcomings including susceptibility to jamming, sender detection and collisions. Let's explore what would be possible if we have more than some $4 radio silicon to play with. I hope to find other people in this space interested in working together to see what could be done.
LoRA is a spread-spectrum protocol, designed for use in negative signal-to-noise ratio applications and in environments with other intentional radiators. While very low data rate, it's impressive just how much LoRA can cut through to deliver the message. Because LoRA targets inexpensive transceiver chips, compromises had to be made with the protocol. But, what if we didn't have that restriction? What if we had some more umph behind it. Could we more effectively hide the LoRA signals, allow signals to be received even when collisions happen with more powerful stations? We will discuss what other people are doing in this space with curved chirps, and mixing in frequency hopping as well as a number of other approaches that can solve problems you probably didn't even know LoRA has!
CNLohr works as a computer engineer for a gaming company in Bellevue, WA, but, got his job from his youtube channel and involvement in open source projects on github involving unusual RF experiments, reverse engineering consumer hardware, and leveraging computing for solving all sorts of interesting problems.