Analysis of Lightweight Boat Communication Equipment Performance for Data Transmission onVHF Long Range (LoRa) Onshore Network System

Traditional fishermen with boats measuring 30 GT and below often do not meet communication and navigation safety standards equipment to avoid get lost and violate national border. This research conducted is to design a ship communication equipment in the VHF maritime frequency band using Long Range technology for data communication in coastal area. VHF channel was chosen because the characteristics of wave propagation are more resistant to interference for communication in the maritime sector. By a modem device on each fishing boat as a node that can send and receive messages and become repeaters. The data receiver system and gateway are the wireless transceiver module and raspberry pi on coastal area. They are used to process information packages from fishermen equipment’s while forwarding the information to the database server. The distances between two nodes that communicate is determined by Haversine method through two coordinates of each node. Each device on a boat equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) to determine the coordinates of the ship's position in real-time and accurate. The interface on the communication device on the fishing boat is implemented using the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screen and input button to facilitate the fishery in its operation. As indicated by the experiments base evaluation, showed that the VHF Wireless Transceiver radios could reach 7.27 kilo meters distance with 27dBm transmission power. Total Packet Error Rate is 5,98% occurs because the transceiver module working on the VHF frequency and lower bandwidth. Based on analysis of the results, communication devices for light-weight boat with Long Range network are able to overcome problems in boat to boat onshore communication