With wireless communications a first "Hello, World!" program can be quite difficult to achieve since it requires not only working IDE and correct setting for programming with only a few lines of code to light a LED but also correctly formatting and sending data and correctly receiving and decoding send data.

For that reason we decided to omit LoRaWAN(protocol) in the beginning and just sent anything over LoRa(Physical layer).

On one side there is B-L072Z-LRWAN1(official development board from STM and Murata) and on the other side, ESP8266 Wemos board and SX1272 LoRa module from Semtec, just stuck in a breadboard with 1/4 of wavelength or 86mm of breadboard wire (btw. 86mm also length of a credit card)

For this ESP wasn't even set-up as with wireless and was used basically as 3.3V arduino for receiving data and sending them to the serial port. Later we will design a board for a 1-channel gateway with SX1272 and a ESP-07 module since it can be used with external directional WiFi antenna and all the electronics for MPPT tracking and battery management and place it on top of a local hill.

When first data finally passed through it was time for a range test. Which consisted of placing dev board on a fixed location and driving around with "gateway" connected to a phone over USB OTG to check the received packets in the android terminal(DroidTerm)

The range for the offical board on 1dBm TX power was about 3km line of sight and a over 1km when behind the hill. The sensor stick had around half the rang of the offical one. When power will be increased to 14dBm and a proper antenna instead of wire will be used on the gateway I estimate the range beyond 10km.