LoRaWAN Sensors & Trackers — Rural IoT
Long-range, low-power sensor networks that watch over every field, yard and outbuilding on the holding.
LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a low-power radio standard built for exactly the kind of monitoring farms and estates need — small readings sent reliably across long distances. A single gateway, backhauled over your broadband or a 4G router, can listen to hundreds of battery sensors spread across the land: water trough and tank levels, gate contacts, soil moisture and temperature, weather conditions, livestock movement and cold-store temperatures. Because each sensor sips so little power, batteries commonly last 3–10 years, so you can drop a sensor in a far paddock or an unheated barn and largely forget about it.
Key features
- Up to 15km Range. Sub-GHz radio carries far further than WiFi or Bluetooth, reaching outlying fields, woodland edges and stone barns where nothing else holds a signal.
- 3–10 Year Battery Life. Sensors draw almost no power, so they keep reporting for years from remote troughs, gateposts and stores — no cabling and barely any maintenance.
- Hundreds of Sensors Per Gateway. One gateway handles 200-plus sensors, so you can cover the whole holding from a single base and add more as new jobs come up.
- Built for Farm Sensing. Trough and tank levels, soil moisture, ground and air temperature, rainfall, gate and door contacts, livestock trackers, cold-store probes and more.
- Cloud Dashboard & Alerts. Every reading lands on a web dashboard with charts, trends and instant alerts — a text or email the moment a tank runs low or a gate is opened.
- Open Standard. LoRaWAN is an open standard with no supplier lock-in, so you can mix sensors from different makers on the same network and pick the best for each task.
Which gateway suits your holding?
You'll need one LoRaWAN gateway per site, fed by your broadband or a 4G router. An indoor gateway is fine for a yard and nearby buildings (roughly 2 km of reach), while an outdoor gateway with a roof- or mast-mounted antenna can blanket open farmland and estate land out to around 15 kilometres. If your ground is split across separate blocks, each needs its own gateway — though a neighbouring farm's gateway can sometimes cover the gap if you're within range and they're willing to share.
The gateway forwards every reading to a cloud platform where you check levels, set alerts and pull off reports for things like cold-chain records. Most gateways cost between £200 and £500, and you can begin with a handful of sensors on your priority jobs — say troughs and the dairy store — then grow the network field by field. We can help you choose the right gateway and plan coverage across the whole holding.
Frequently asked questions
What is LoRaWAN?
LoRaWAN is a low-power radio network that lets small sensors send readings over very long distances — up to 15 kilometres. It's ideal for keeping an eye on things like trough levels, soil moisture, gate contacts or cold-store temperatures across a farm or estate, without needing WiFi or mobile signal out at every sensor.
Do I need internet out in the fields?
No — only the gateway needs a connection. The gateway sits where you have broadband or a 4G router and pushes readings up to your dashboard. The sensors out in the paddocks and barns only talk to the gateway over the LoRa radio link, so they need no internet and no mains power.
Is LoRaWAN free to run?
The radio band is licence-free in the UK, so there's no airtime cost for the sensor traffic itself. You pay for the gateway, the sensors and an optional cloud subscription to view and manage the data — with no per-message charges piling up as you add more sensors.
How many sensors can one gateway cover?
A single gateway usually handles 200 or more sensors, depending on how often each one reports. Most farms run far fewer than that, so you can start with a couple of troughs or a cold store and keep adding sensors across the holding over time.
How long do the sensor batteries last?
Most LoRaWAN sensors run for three to ten years on a single battery, depending on how often they report. That's what makes them practical for a trough in the back field or a probe in an unheated store — places you don't want to be visiting to swap batteries every few months.
Can I mix sensors from different makers?
Yes — LoRaWAN is an open standard, so a soil probe from one supplier and a tank-level sensor from another will both work through the same gateway. You're free to choose the best sensor for each job rather than being tied to one manufacturer's catalogue.
Does the gateway need planning permission?
No — a LoRaWAN gateway is a small, low-power unit, much like a WiFi router. It's typically fitted indoors or on an outbuilding wall, sometimes with a small roof antenna for extra reach, and doesn't need planning permission.