ON THE REALIZATION OF A COMMUNICATION SYSTEM FOR ATMOSPHERIC PROBES BASED ON LORA TECHNOLOGIES: PRELIMINARY MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS

Characterization of atmospheric properties remains a latent ambiguity for weather forecasting and climate models since their characteristics depends on multidisciplinary processes in a wide range of natural scales. The development of ultra-small light disposable radio probes is important to understand this properties Being light-weighted, the probes will have a fluiddifferent atmospheric layers after been released, thus simulating the behaviour of small particles (e.g. drops). Each disposable probe is equipped with compact size microprocessors (presently the first prototype uses velocity, acceleration, pressure, temperature). The probes collect, store and then send the coded information to a base station located at the ground through a dedicated radio transmission link. It is to be noted that longrange communication link (10 km) should be assured with low power consumption technology: a network -modules and the base station is the potential adopted solution. In order to realize the communication system for the atmospheric probes, some prototypal links and networks have bene realized using the Adafruit Feather 32u4 LoRa Radio RFM95 modules. It is an embedded module, which contains a LoRa transceiver RFM95 and an ATmega32u4 microcontroller. The radio module can be powered using 3.3 volts either by using a micro USB or an external battery and it can transmit from +5 dBm to +20 dBm, which are theoretically enough for the purpose of this study. The present work presents the preliminary measurements made both in indoor and outdoor environment considering differ find the best set of parameters to work in the harsh environment to acquire information about warm clouds and send them to the ground receiver. Particularly detailed measurements have been made in harsh environmental found inside a warm cloud. The measurements techniques and results are presented together with the realization of a first operational prototype of both probes and ground receiver.