Field Sensor Network for Microclimatological Measurements

This paper brings an overview of the designed system for monitoring hydrothermal soil CO
2
flux, especially its wireless infrastructure based on a private LoRaWAN network. There are interesting results in terms of LoRaWAN performance in the target location – valley of river Becva in the Hranice karst,ˇ a hydrothermal karst area located in the eastern Czech Republic, home of the famous deepest freshwater abyss in the world – Hranice Abbys. The main obtained key result is the overall performance of LoRaWAN infrastructure in the target area, based on iC880A gateway and nodes with Microchip RN2483, all registered in The Things Network. Measured data were obtained by sending WGS84 format coordinates through the network. Upon reception, the gateway supplemented the data with the parameters of the received signal and stored with the data to Google Spreadsheets. Since the weakest RSSI received within the are is well above -120 dBm, not reaching the -135 dBm limit of the gateway, the results suggest relatively good potential of this technology in this application, even though the environment is quite of diverse character, therefore the obstacles are not uniformly distributed and growing distance does not always imply more obstructing objects in the signal path.