We are hard at work to get first vineyard trial installations done by early April.
Too busy for frequent update logs, but here's a snapshot of what's going on.

There will be an updated design for the Vinduino remote node. See picture below.

Updates include:

• 4 sensor inputs (previously 3)
• integrated RTC
• integrated battery charger and solar panel support
• lower power design
• support for Globaltech LM-210 LoRa radio modem (licence free 915 MHz band)
• lower cost components

As I am still working on finalizing the schematics and PCB, there is no update on Github yet.
Below schematic is not finalized, but provided here for a high level impression.

Range experiments using the FCC approved GlobalTech modules show a range of at least 6 miles. I had one unit set up on the balcony of our house in Temecula, and the other unit was connected to a GPS receiver on the roof of my car, reporting GPS coordinates and RSSI (radio signal strength) every 10 seconds. The data was imported in Google maps, showing the coverage. See picture below.

Basically, for all the wineries located around the main winery road, Rancho California road, there is good coverage. There is another wine trail road, De Portola, that does not have full line-of-sight coverage from my vineyard location. Based this data, we assume that the whole wine region can be covered with a star topology using only 2-3 central hubs. Assuming hourly transmissions per node, we can support up to 300 remote nodes per hub.

In collaboration with Luke Beno's Analog.IO project we are step-by-step resolving the issues of managing a network of this scale.