Development of Long-range Communication System for Fishermen: An Initial Study

In this paper, we report the initial study to design and development of long-range wireless communication system based on LoRa technology for Indonesian fishermen in which the targeted ship is under <;5 GT (small-ship category). The developed system consists of 1) customizable end-node; 2) Android apps equipped in a smartphone as a user interface (namely e-Nelayan app); 3) gateway; 4) and a server application for online monitoring purpose. The e-Nelayan app covers three features: the SOS button, chat, and recent weather information. While the end-node part includes Bluetooth module, Microcontroller, Long-range radio module, power regulator circuit, and Li-Po battery for main supply, all of them are packed based on the consumer product. The discussion of this paper focuses on a) the brief description of the proposed system; b) the profile of developed android app, c) and anatomy of the hardware. Moreover, the tests (both for laboratory test and field test) also have been observed. Since the proposed system is an initial study, hence we conduct on the demo of `ping connection' in lab scale test. While for the field test, we used RSSI analysis and object tracker test.