Hi all!
I am planning the hw components of a sensor system. The system consists of a "main" station that typically could be a MEGA (although I am thinking an ESP32 instead) with a LoRa RFM95. The main station should regularly report using LoRaWAN.
Then there are smaller "slave" nodes that would be situated within 20m, typically doing sensor work and transmitting this to the main station. Initially I felt RFM69 between the main and the nodes would be ideal, but that would mean the main station needs both an RFM69 and an RFM95 to do the LoRaWAN communication.
Another approach is to use RFM95 only, both in main and in slaves, thus eliminating one radio chip in the main station. Thus my question. know so far that RFM69 has hw encryption, higher speeds, larger payloads, much better library support. And of course, RFM95 has a much larger reach but in this case that's not interesting.
If the RFM69 is better from a consumption viewpoint that is important since we want the slaves to run for at least 1 year on 2AA (typically). Thus, the automatic output power "down scaling" I read about sounds great.
Any views on this? I am leaning towards using RFM69 between the nodes and an extra RFM95 for the LoRaWAN uplink.
regards, Göran