Sigfox has announced end of last week the opening of the device Geo-location service. This solution allows to get the location of a device based on its radio signal.
Different announced has been made in this domain by Sigfox and its competitors LoRaWan. The technics in place are not the same and the Sigfox solution is based on BigData.
From the beginning Sigfox was returning a device location based on the signal measured by the different base-stations. This location was previously rounded to the nearest lat/lng degree. This information has a precision of 100km x 150km basically. Even if it was not possible to locate a device precisely, i was interesting to know in what country corner it was located.
With the service launched in February 2017 Sigfox is moving to a more precise location based on radio signal, according to different discussions I had the precision goes from a couple of meters to some kilometers depending on situation, data already gathered at this position, number of antennas …
The downlink process is the way a sensor can receive data from the network. This process is really useful if you need the device to execute an action or if you want to change the sensor behavior.
Episode 3 & 4 of my Youtube series about LPWAN is about antennas for LPWAN and impact on object design. The episode 4 go deeper on the way to improve radio performance by tuning and adapting antennas with matching circuit.
The RF 868MHz is a public bandwidth European Low Power Networks (LPWAN) as Sigfox and LoRaWan are using for communicating.
This post is a VLOG entry, as usual in French, you will find the english text version in the next part of the post.
I recently bought an AirSpy mini SDR (Software defined radio) dongle. Understand, it is a radio scanner you connect on your computer able to analyze radio communications on a large frequency range from 24MHz to 1,7HGz. The main difference between this SDR and the low cost one based on RTL 2832 + R820T is the spectrum view up to 6Mhz, the TCXO working with 0,5ppm and globally the quality of the solution and the availability of libraries. What is presented here is also valid for RTL based dongle.