Creek Level Node Deployment

Big milestone for the team last week. We managed to install our creek level sensor prototype at a local farm in the Majura Valley. The process also involved establishing reliable LoRa comms to the property from the Belconnen region to monitor water height and the reliability of the node.

As above and below, the node was dynabolted onto a concrete causeway crossing. The distance from the sensor to the bottom of the creek bed was measured, and then set on the device as a reference value. This allows the node to send water height values (rather than raw distance to water values) - giving more meaningful and useful data.

As below, the solar panel has the ability to be tilted up to 45 degrees either direction along one axis. In this case, the panel was tilted approx. 35 deg in the NE direction - due to the mounting orientation on the bridge.

The small repeater node mounted half way up the roof of the below shed is serving as a vital link for communication between the creek level node and western Canberra. From this location, it has reliable comms to the creek level node - which is in an inherently poor RF propagation area - low in a creek line.

We experimented with a number of different repeater node locations, the below is an example of a location that was not suitable. While it had connection to western Canberra (via Mt Ainslie repeaters) it could not reliably reach into the creek line where the sensor was.