LoRaWAN nodes

The Sodaq boards are nice boards. Their Sodaq ONE board is a very nice board. It combines a GPS, a LoRa module and an Arduino Zero compatible controller on a very small board (40x25mm). These are very nice boards for some sensors we are developing for TheThingsNetwork Nijmegen.

ONE

The ONE is the latest board from Sodaq. This board combines the power of an Arduino Zero with a good GPS and a LoRa module.

The ATSAMD21J18 microcontroller is an ARM Cortex M0+ with good power management possibilities. Combine this with the uBlox EVA 8M GPS and the LoRa module from Microchip and you get a high performance board with good performance on batteries.

With a few members of TheThingsNetwork Nijmegen we bought a bunch of those boards to play with (we now actually have 3 Sodaq Autonomo boards with LoRaBee shield and 6 Sodaq ONE boards). Since I want to explore the different options, I bought 2 ONE boards and different 868 MHz and GPS antennas.
For GPS I now have the choice between the bulky GPS Puck antenna and the large and small ceramic active antenna. I also have another smaller GPS puck with magnetic base, used for mounting on a car. I want to measure the current consumption and the performance of those antennas.

The options for the LoRa antenna are simpler. Sodaq sells a dipole antenna from Molex and a simple straight wire antenna. I am curious as to which antenna will have the best performance.