The following discussion was posted on Element-14.

João Ferreira (FEUP) wrote:

I am new at this community and my English isn’t at its highest level but I think it is interesting to open a topic about long range wireless communications.

Imagine you need to communicate over more than 5Km without wires, what would be your solution? It doesn’t need to be something new or something difficult the idea is to gather some solutions already on the market and discuss some new possibilities. Any scenario is possible!!

To start this topic my idea for a wide sensor network without wires is using these nice things: http://www.libelium.com/products/waspmote

I still didn’t test this equipment but they say they cover 12km with LOS I will post something more when I get to test them.

Remember any type of wireless communications are on the table, for any type of data!!!

Chris Pinter answered:

This is an interesting conversation.  However,  there are a couple of points that need t be reviewed from communication theory.   There are many factors that affect propagation, not just output power or the height of the antenna.    Please take a look at my blog on What affect radio range.

Radio Frequency Range Consideration

I published this blog a while ago, to help every engineer understand all of the factors that need to be considered.

Remember the good old days……Long before me time in fact…. Radio communication used to be all about range. AM radio bounced off of the ionosphere.  Before cellular phones and satellites the radios were developed with the environment in mind to ad in propagation.

If you want longer range consider lowering the frequency, band width, data rate and increase the antenna gain, receiver sensitivity and output power.