WiFi Halow 802.11ah Help

[aaron94]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering if there's any WiFi experts here that can help me.

I'm not a networking professional. I muck around a bit with it and know some of the basics, but I spend a lot of time with rural IoT devices, sensors, etc. Stuff I wouldn't consider internet of shit. More home made solutions on a very small scale, mostly for fun using Arduinos, ESP32, etc.

I'm VERY interested in WiFi Halow. Being able to use regular IP, connect directly to an MQTT server over a kilometre link, etc, is very appealing. I've been using LoRa over a private chirpstack server (Class C) and it's not the greatest.

But at the moment, all the WiFi Halow gateways are only on AliExpress/AliBaba and I feel like they might still be a bit beyond me. But I don't understand the Halow standard either, I assume at the very least you need to set the country of operation so the correct band plan is used, right?

I was speaking to one person on AliBaba and apparently you can login to the device via serial (no web gui apparently) and say use PuTTY and configure (via AT commands) the following:

SSID
Encryption
Frequency start/end
MCS (Unsure what this is, multicast?)
TX Bandwidth (1, 2, 4 or 8Mhz)
TX Power
RSSI

So I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this. I'm not really a radio expert and had a lot of these issues setting up my LoRa Gateway. Obviously I don't want a cellular carrier knocking on my door.

But can anyone shed some light, does Halow need a country setting? Should me configuring the freq start/end and tx power, rssi be enough to make it okay for use in Australia? Should I just wait until we get better gateways designed with Australia in mind, with a simple web gui with a drop down box for Countries?

Just wanted to start some discussion, surely this would benefit a lot of makers doing stuff in rural applications.

Thanks!

I ordered one of these: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002927477262.html

I'll open it up and try find a serial header