The beauty of a private LoRa network is that it's genuinely yours, no carrier, no per-animal SIM, and it keeps working in mobile dead-zones. Here's the shape of it.
The three pieces
- Gateways, usually solar, mounted high (a shed roof, a hill, a pole). A handful cover most farms; line of sight and elevation matter more than the number.
- ChirpStack, the open-source LoRaWAN network server that manages your devices and decodes their messages. You self-host it cheaply, or run it on a small box on-farm.
- Flockarewe, ChirpStack forwards each uplink to your Flockarewe webhook, where it becomes a position, a geofence check, an alert, and a point on your map.
Getting positions out of tags
GNSS collars decode to a latitude/longitude in ChirpStack's payload formatter. Lighter ear tags are located by the gateways that hear them. Either way, the decoded data flows into Flockarewe through one HTTP integration.
Tip, Point ChirpStack's HTTP integration at your Flockarewe LoRa webhook (event=up) and claim each devEui to the right animal, that's the whole connection.
Start small, expand
Begin with one gateway covering your busiest paddocks and a handful of tags, prove the coverage, then add gateways for the back blocks. Because the network is yours, growing it is just more hardware, no rising data bill per head.
Keep your stock in sight
Tag your stock with LoRa ear tags and collars, watch every paddock on one map, and let Shep flag trouble, all from one app.
