Finding Optimum Settings for a 433MHz Radio for Long Range Communication

Wireless sensor networks are currently widely used in various monitoring and control applications. Most of the deployed wireless sensor networks are now based on 2.4GHz radio, which have the advantage of having higher data rate due to availability of wider channels. This advantage, however, comes at the cost of short range communication and having a crowded band. 433MHz radio communication is an alternative to the busy 2.4GHz radio band, which solves some of the disadvantages of the 2.4GHz radio. To have a clear insight on performance of 433MHz radio in practice and to characterize it under realistic conditions, in this paper, we present results of our experiments in terms of connectivity, communication range, and packet loss ratio performed in both indoor and outdoor environments. We also investigate the inter-communication capability of different chips and show how they can communicate with each other even in presence of some differences in the physical level. This is an important information to allow building 433MHz compatible networks using different radio chips. Different radio settings are experimented for trying to find out the optimum setting for long range communication. The optimum preamble length, data rate, frequency deviation and antennas are proposed based on the experiments.