An off-grid solar gateway that aggregates a star network of LoRa soil sensors, classifies the data at the edge and pushes only what matters over a simplex satellite link. Built for banana plantations where mobile networks do not reach, and installed on a working plantation in Bucay, Ecuador.
Read this precisely. This is a Field Lab pilot, not a deployed commercial service. The power core is derived from the field-proven satellite telemetry platform described in SYS-02, but this gateway, its sensor network and its dashboard are a prototype validated in a single field test. No client operation depends on it.
A banana plantation in the Ecuadorian interior has plots spread over kilometres, no mains power at the plot edge and, in large stretches, no usable cellular signal. Irrigation decisions are therefore made by walking the plots and by judgement, not by measurement — which means water is applied uniformly across plots whose soil moisture is not uniform at all.
Connecting every sensor directly is the obvious answer and the wrong one. Per-node satellite radios would be prohibitively expensive, and per-node cellular modems do not work where there is no coverage. The real problem is to move measurements several kilometres across the plantation for almost no energy, decide locally which of them are worth money, and pay for a satellite uplink only on those.
Per-plot soil moisture replaces uniform scheduling, so water and pumping energy go where the deficit actually is.
A single satellite uplink at the gateway serves the whole sensor network, removing any dependence on mobile carriers.
Edge classification keeps routine readings local, so only alerts and summaries consume billable satellite messages.
Bluetooth diagnostics let a technician read the gateway log in the field without opening the enclosure or carrying a laptop.
One gateway sits at the centre of a star. Soil and ambient nodes reach it over LoRa from across the plantation; the gateway is the only element that talks to the outside world.
The gateway was mounted on a plot-edge post in Bucay and commissioned on site. The photographs below are from that field test in September 2026.
The operator view is deliberately narrow: moisture per plot, which plot needs water, and whether the gateway and its uplink are alive. A plantation foreman should be able to read it in a few seconds, in sunlight, on a tablet.
| Sensing | Soil-moisture and ambient temperature nodes, one per plot, distributed across the plantation. |
|---|---|
| Field link | LoRa star topology, nodes reporting to a single gateway several kilometres away. |
| Edge processing | Classification and threshold logic on the gateway: water-stress and anomaly conditions are detected in the field, not in the cloud. |
| Uplink | Globalstar Simplex satellite, 9-byte payload per transmission, carrying alerts and periodic summaries only. |
| Local access | Bluetooth for on-site diagnostics and log reading from a tablet. |
| Power | Solar harvesting with battery management, sized for continuous operation under plantation canopy shade. |
| Backend | Real-time ingestion server with a web dashboard. |
Schematics, PCB manufacturing files, bills of materials, firmware source and credentials are protected and are not published.
| LoRa in the field, satellite only at the gateway | Aggregating first is what makes the economics work. One satellite subscription serves the whole plantation instead of one per node, and the LoRa hop costs almost nothing per reading. |
|---|---|
| Inference at the edge, not in the cloud | A simplex satellite link is narrow and billed per message, so sending every raw reading is not an option. Deciding on the gateway means the link carries conclusions rather than data. The trade is firmware complexity and less raw history for later analysis. |
| Nine bytes is the entire budget | Globalstar Simplex allows 9 bytes per transmission — 72 bits, and that is the whole frame. The firmware spends it one byte per plot. The high nibble carries soil moisture quantised to 16 levels, which is finer than an irrigation decision needs; the low nibble is four independent flags, one bit each — sensor OK, battery low, upper threshold exceeded, lower threshold exceeded. One transmission therefore reports nine plots completely, moisture and health together. The Bucay pilot runs six, so the frame still has headroom. BYTE 0 · PLOT 1…BYTE 8 · PLOT 9 BITS 7–4 · MOISTURE, 16 LEVELSBITS 3–0 · STATUS FLAGS B3 · SENSOR OKB2 · BATTERY LOWB1 · UPPER THRESHOLDB0 · LOWER THRESHOLD Capacity scales in blocks of nine: a second burst covers plots 10–18, a third 19–27. Two consecutive bursts have been transmitted and received in the field, so the ceiling on plot count is billable messages, not the frame. |
| Reuse of the maritime power core | The energy-harvesting and duty-cycling design comes from the vessel-monitoring platform, where it has run 6+ years without battery service. Plantation canopy shade is a harsher harvesting environment than open sea, which is exactly what this pilot needed to test. |
| Bluetooth for service, not for operation | Field diagnostics over BLE avoid opening a sealed enclosure in a humid environment. It is deliberately a service channel: no operational data path depends on someone standing next to the gateway. |
| Engineering status | Field test |
|---|---|
| Location | Working banana plantation, Bucay, Ecuador. |
| Date | September 2026. |
| Demonstrated | Gateway installed and commissioned on site; LoRa nodes reporting across plots; edge classification producing an irrigation alert; satellite uplink delivering to the server; BLE diagnostics from a tablet. |
| Not demonstrated | Multi-season operation, agronomic yield or water-saving outcomes, performance across multiple plantations, and long-term enclosure survival under canopy humidity. |
| Dashboard | The operator view on this page is a rendered mockup, not a deployed client system. |
| Reused from production | Energy-harvesting and duty-cycling design derived from SYS-02, which is field-proven. |
Why this section exists. Status labels are used consistently across this site: FIELD-PROVEN, FIELD TEST, SIMULATED DASHBOARD. A prototype validated in one field test is not a production system, and a rendered dashboard is never presented as a deployed one.
The same gateway core applies wherever measurements must cross a few kilometres of terrain with no coverage and only a fraction of them are worth transmitting: precision agriculture, forestry and environmental monitoring, and remote-asset supervision. Next steps are multi-season operation on the Bucay site and a second plantation with a different canopy and soil profile.
If you have a remote crop or asset with no connectivity, I am interested in the problem.