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Wi-Fi HaLow ​

COMING SOONHardware on its way to the bench, nothing tested.What the codes mean

Two HaLow boards are on their way to the bench. Nothing has run on a HaLow radio.

Wi-Fi HaLow (IEEE 802.11ah) is Wi-Fi below 1 GHz: slower than ordinary Wi-Fi and reaching further. It carries IP, so Reticulum's UDP and AutoInterface run over it with no new code in the Bridge; see IP mesh.

What to expect in Europe ​

Not tens of megabits. In the European band HaLow works in 863 to 868 MHz with channels of 1 or 2 MHz, at 25 mW, and with a duty cycle limit of 10 percent per hour for an access point and 2.8 percent for a station. That makes it a link well under one megabit per second. It is still far faster than a LoRa mesh, and it speaks IP.

We have measured none of this. The point of the bench is to replace these expectations with numbers.

The hardware ​

Two LILYGO T-HaLow boards for 868 MHz. They are a bench pair, not a kit radio: the board passes IP only through its Ethernet port. A small HaLow USB adapter for the European band that Linux drives without an out-of-tree driver could not be bought when we looked.

What we plan to test, and how ​

  1. Set both boards to 863 to 868 MHz before any transmission, clear of 869.525 MHz where the kits' Meshtastic radios work.
  2. Record the firmware the boards ship with and the antennas in the box.
  3. Pair them as access point and station. On the Raspberry Pi side the board hangs on a USB Ethernet adapter, and the new interface never takes the default route.
  4. Measure range and throughput with iperf3 at several distances.
  5. Run Reticulum over the link.

The result is recorded whatever it is, and the HaLow line on the IP mesh page changes only when it is true.

Between the bench and a kit ​

A V1 kit has one Ethernet port, inside a sealed case, and fiber wants it too. Until a case is opened for a small switch, HaLow stays a pair on the bench.

Not tested yet ​

Everything on a HaLow radio. UDP and AutoInterface are verified against rnsd in software only.

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