Hi Peter,
Thank you for the congrats. Please let me take the opportunity to give my congratulations back to you for bringing a great bird into the sky and supporting the ham radio community with perfect service!
As this forum is mainly in English I’ve translated my documentation about the LoRa APRS experiment via QO-100 into English language and would like to provide it here, so that everyone in this forum can read my text: https://www.dropbox.com/s/84zl…Ra_Documentation.pdf?dl=0
I know of course that 125 kHz Bandwidth is far outside the specification of transmissions for the NB transponder. When I began with the experiment and repeatedly at certain improvement stages, I checked the downlink at my own station and also via the BATC web-sdr and didn’t see any noise in the waterfall, nor did I experience any disturbance receiving an SSB signal. So, I assumed that I didn’t cause any disturbance with my experiment from a user perspective. In other way I would have stopped my experiment. But I agree, you as service provider must have much more detailed insight into various transponder stages and surely you may have found my LoRa Signal.
I don’t think that there is a problem using LoRa in the amateur radio service, at least in Austria. I know that there are certain differences between German and Austrian amateur radio regulations. For example in Austria FM repeaters need to shut down the TX not later than 10 seconds after the last voice transmission, while in Germany repeaters are often active for a minute or more. So maybe there is a restriction on using LoRa in Germany, but I don’t think there is one in Austria. We had some problems using D-Star back in 2007, when it came to Europe. The Austrian ‘Amateurfunkverordnung’ https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/Gelt…n&Gesetzesnummer=10012930 (unfortunately only in German) was then restricting transmissions to certain emission classes and W7D, which is D-Star, was not included in the list of allowed emissions. Therefore the law was changed in 2008 and now §7 allows ‘ALL technically possible transmissions’ for radio amateurs in Austria.
I really don’t think that a new modulation technique is a kind of encryption, which wouldn’t be allowed in Austria as well. If you don’t have a packet radio modem or a sound card with the needed software package or some other means to decode you would not be able to receive and display packet radio signals. If you don’t have a LoRa chip, you are not able to receive LoRa transmissions. I don’t see a big difference here …
Anyway, I hope that there will be a clarification on the use of LoRa in amateur radio soon. As we are now in contact, I hope we will keep in touch, so that I can inform you if I have new ideas for not-bandplan conforming Experiments before going on air.
73s de Andreas, oe3dmb