We deployed a private LoRa (and also an LTE) network on the Greenland ice sheet for one of our experiments. We use LTE for data transfer and LoRAWAN for housekeeping / control (and leave it on during the winter when we have no solar power and are basically just monitoring our batteries). We are taking full advantage of our remote location and Greenland's nebulous ITU region to have them in almost the same band (using LTE band 8 and LoRa in the US ISM band).
The most annoying part was porting LoRaMAC to the samd21, since getting the timing reliable was a bit of a pain. We used the sx1272 as our radio.
We use a Chirpstack backend, which handles authentication and such and passes the unencrypted the LoRaWAN messages over mqtt, which we subscribe to, decode, and stick into a pgsql database on our server on the ice sheet. We then use log shipping replication to get a replica of the database to a server sitting in our lab where we are not bandwidth constrained for monitoring.
So far our farthest stations are about 5 km away from our base station. The RSSI is around -111 dB, this is using ~20 dBm transmit power and 8 dBi omni antennas on both sides (plus of course a few dB of cable loss). Yes, this is in the 915 MHz band.
We tested our LTE network out to about 9 km and it worked, and LoRa should have a better link budget. The frequency is roughly the same.
I went to physics grad school and stuck with it, more or less. Building physics experiments is great if you want to do a whole bunch of things poorly :).
The most annoying part was porting LoRaMAC to the samd21, since getting the timing reliable was a bit of a pain. We used the sx1272 as our radio.
We use a Chirpstack backend, which handles authentication and such and passes the unencrypted the LoRaWAN messages over mqtt, which we subscribe to, decode, and stick into a pgsql database on our server on the ice sheet. We then use log shipping replication to get a replica of the database to a server sitting in our lab where we are not bandwidth constrained for monitoring.