Raspberry Pi LoRa Boards: A Long-Range Radio Guide

A buyer's guide to Raspberry Pi LoRa boards and long-range 4G HATs, from a 19 USD Waveshare SX1262 node module to a 149 euros LoRaWAN concentrator.

Alex Circuit★Jul 19, 2026★8 min read

Picking a Long-Range Radio for Your Pi Project

WiFi stops at the end of the garden. Bluetooth stops at the end of the room. If you want a Raspberry Pi or a Pico reporting soil moisture from the far corner of a field, tracking a beehive, or pinging a water tank a few kilometres away, you need a radio built for distance rather than throughput. LoRa is the obvious answer, and a July 17, 2026 roundup on the official Raspberry Pi blog gathered the current crop of boards worth knowing about. This guide walks through the LoRa options, the cellular alternatives when LoRa's bandwidth is simply too small, and how to decide which one belongs in your build. Prices are as listed by the vendors at time of writing.

Key Takeaways

LoRa trades bandwidth for reach: roughly 300bps to 50kbps, with range up to about 15km in open rural conditions.
The Waveshare SX1262 LoRa Node Module for Pico is the cheapest entry at GBP 14 / 19 USD and ships with a 600mAh LiPo, charging IC, and antenna.
The Adafruit LoRa Radio Bonnet with OLED at GBP 31 / 42 USD adds a 128x32 display and three buttons for standalone field debugging.
When kilobits per second will not cut it, 4G LTE HATs range from the Clipper HAT Mini at GBP 30 / 33 USD to the Waveshare SIM7600G-H at GBP 80 / 107 USD.

Quick Picks

Best budget pick: Waveshare SX1262 LoRa Node Module for Pico - GBP 14 / 19 USD, and the bundled battery plus antenna means you are not shopping for accessories on day two.
Best all-in-one: Perpetuo LoRa - GBP 21 / 28 USD, an RP2350 microcontroller and an Embit radio on one board, so the node is the whole computer.
Best gateway option: iC880A-SPI LoRaWAN concentrator - 149 euros, the multichannel card you build a proper gateway around rather than a single-channel listener.

The Boards, Side by Side

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Waveshare SX1262 LoRa Node Module for Pico

At GBP 14 / 19 USD this is the least expensive way to put a Raspberry Pi Pico on a long-range link. It carries a Semtech SX1262 at 868MHz, with a 915MHz variant for regions that use that band, and the package includes a 600mAh 3.7V LiPo cell, a charging IC, and an antenna. That accessory bundle matters more than the headline price suggests - a bare radio module plus a separate charger board plus an antenna usually lands you in the same territory anyway, with three times the wiring. If you are prototyping a fleet of identical remote sensors, this is the board to buy five of.

Perpetuo LoRa

The Perpetuo LoRa is a different philosophy: rather than bolting a radio onto a Pico, it puts an RP2350 microcontroller and an Embit EMB-LR1276S 868MHz radio on the same GBP 21 / 28 USD board. You get 32 pins with 20 GPIO available, a Qwiic-STEMMA QT connector for solder-free sensor chaining, and a low-power mode aimed squarely at battery deployments. For anyone who has already invested in Qwiic sensors, this is the shortest path from a boxed sensor to a transmitting node. It also keeps the physical footprint tight, which helps when the enclosure has to survive a winter on a fencepost.

Adafruit LoRa Radio Bonnet with OLED

The GBP 31 / 42 USD Adafruit bonnet sits on a full-size Raspberry Pi and brings an RFM95W - an SX1276 under the hood - with user-selectable 868MHz or 915MHz operation. The standout feature is the 128x32 OLED and three buttons on the board itself. Being able to read link status off a screen while standing in a field, with no laptop and no SSH session, is worth real money when you are siting antennas. A U.FL connector lets you run an external antenna to wherever the signal actually is, rather than wherever the Pi happens to sit.

How Far Does LoRa Actually Reach?

The honest answer is that it depends almost entirely on what is between the two radios. The figure quoted in the Raspberry Pi roundup is up to roughly 15km in rural conditions, and that is a fair upper bound for line-of-sight across open ground with a decent antenna at both ends. Drop the same pair of radios into a dense town centre and a few hundred metres through buildings is a more realistic expectation.

The reason those distances are achievable at all is the data rate. LoRa runs between 300bps and 50kbps. That is not a typo - bits, not megabits. Spreading a tiny payload across a wide chunk of spectrum for a relatively long time is exactly what buys the link budget. So the practical rule is simple: if your payload is a temperature reading, a GPS fix, or a door-open event, LoRa is superb. If your payload is a photo, look elsewhere.

Antenna height beats antenna cost almost every time. Before you spend on a higher-gain element, spend on getting the existing one three metres further off the ground.

Do I Need a LoRaWAN Gateway?

Not necessarily. A pair of LoRa radios can talk to each other directly in point-to-point mode with no gateway and no network server anywhere in the picture. For a single sensor reporting to a single Raspberry Pi in the house, that is the simplest thing that works, and it keeps the whole system under your control.

You want a gateway when the node count grows, when you want nodes from different projects sharing one uplink, or when you want the standardised LoRaWAN addressing, encryption, and duty-cycle handling that comes with the protocol. That is where the iC880A-SPI concentrator at 149 euros comes in. It is a multichannel card, meaning it listens across several channels and spreading factors simultaneously rather than sitting on one, which is the difference between a real gateway and a hobby listener. Pair it with a Raspberry Pi for the host side and you have a legitimate LoRaWAN gateway on your own roof.

When LoRa Is Not Enough: The 4G HATs

Sometimes the constraint is bandwidth, not distance, and the honest move is to stop fighting LoRa and put a SIM in the project. The same roundup covers two cellular options at very different points on the curve.

The Clipper HAT Mini is the budget route at GBP 30 / 33 USD, built around a SIMCom A7683E 4G LTE modem with up to 10Mbps down and 5Mbps up, and a nano SIM slot. For a remote camera uploading a few frames an hour or a Pi that needs a reliable out-of-band management path, that is comfortably enough.

The Waveshare SIM7600G-H 4G HAT is the serious option at GBP 80 / 107 USD. It offers global LTE Cat 4 coverage with up to 150Mbps down and 50Mbps up, plus built-in GPS and support for SMS and voice. The global band coverage is the real selling point for anything that travels - a vehicle tracker or a portable field kit that has to work across borders without a hardware swap. The built-in GPS also removes a separate module from the bill of materials.

Choosing Between Them

Run the arithmetic on data volume first. A LoRa node sending a 20-byte payload every ten minutes costs you essentially nothing per year and runs for months on a small cell. A 4G HAT needs a data plan, more power, and a network that reaches the site. Long battery life plus tiny payloads points to LoRa; larger payloads or genuine internet access at the far end points to cellular. There is no shame in running both, with LoRa for routine telemetry and an LTE HAT that wakes up only when something interesting happens.

Building Your First Node

Start small and prove the link before you build the enclosure. Flash two of the cheapest boards you bought, get them exchanging counters on a bench, then walk one of them away until packets stop arriving. That single walk test teaches you more about your site than any range calculator. Only once you know the real-world reach should you commit to antenna placement and weatherproofing.

If you are still deciding on the host computer for the gateway side, our mini computers section covers the current small-form-factor field, and the best mini PC for local LLMs guide is a useful reference for anyone who wants the same box doing on-device inference on incoming sensor data. For a look at how low-power wireless integrates into a home automation stack, the ESP32 wM-Bus gateway for Home Assistant build is a close cousin of the LoRa approach, and the ESP Aliro SDK for ESP32 smart locks piece covers the security side of embedded radio work.

LoRa boards for the Raspberry Pi have reached a genuinely comfortable place. Under 20 USD gets you a complete battery-powered node, around 30 USD gets you one with a screen, and 149 euros gets you a real gateway. That is a full stack of long-range connectivity for less than the price of one commercial industrial telemetry unit, and every layer of it is yours to modify.

Sources: Raspberry Pi - July 17, 2026.