First idea was to build a weather station "house" based on ESP8266 WiFi module for connectivity since I know it quite well and GSM for backup. And even though We managed to create a over-decent WiFi coverage in our apple orchard(65Mbps/10Mbps) using Mikrotik Metal 2 router the system is not scalable to others in the vicinity since the microclimate changes quite significantly due to diversity of terrain from near river(like ours) to slopes on the surrounding hills.

I have been quite interested in LoRa from 2014 Münich electronica(with their 6 gateway covered the city campaign), but started dabbling with it only last year. I was quite impressed with the field test when we managed to reach 10km with just wire sticking from the breadboard.

Few months ago I got my hands on FCC certified LoRa modules with processor(SX1276+STM32L072 from Murata) and we decided to ditch the ESP version(because of consumption and limited range) and focused on the new LoRa module.