Antenna type and design can make all the difference in the world with regards to performance. Even plain-old 2.4GHz or 5GHz WiFi can work great over large distances provided that you use a parabolic reflector, yagi, log-periodic, etc. Microwave linking is all the rage nowadays, with WISPs popping up all over the place and large commercial operators using microwave links as backhaul between internet-connected sites (usually cell tower sites). But LoRa is still really awesome for low-bandwidth data with minimal antenna considerations, and having it be such a convenient standalone package with some of the boards available is just icing on the cake.

Do you recommend any resources in particular for learning more about improving WiFi range and reliability, or should I just google some of those terms?

I briefly dug into it but had the sense that it might be a bit over my head. I’m not great with hardware — I just goof around with it a bit and make fun stuff for hobbies. Making WiFi work better would be really useful for some things, though.

Those are all directional antennas, for when your client is at a fixed predictable location.

LoRaWAN is so awesome. It's the sweet spot between Wifi and ZigBee/Z-Wave. Has phenomenal range and networking options. I've got a few devices around 1/4 mile from the base station and they're highly reliable. I wish the home automation market would have adopted it earlier. There are a few brands out there that are decent but it's unfortunate the market is so fragmented. At least with Z-Wave you're not tied to a specific vendor and interop is relatively good these days. LoRa is pretty immature in the market but, at least, it seems to be progressing.

The downside to LoRaWAN is the implementation of mesh. It, generally, requires far more planning currently - but I'll be curious to see how it evolves with more mainstream applications.

I wondered if LoRa is a little immature still, but I wasn’t sure. For how easy it is to get going with, it still requires quite a bit of playing around, non-standard libraries, etc.

I was totally content to accept that once I saw how well it solved my problem. WiFi has a clear cut path to getting what you want accomplished which seems great from the outset, but is totally useless if it’s not reliable. I’ve found that WiFi-based projects generally need to be really, really close to an access point to be properly reliable.

As another comment mentioned though there are probably plenty of ways I could mitigate these problems, so it’s as much an issue with me trying to use a technology wrong as it is a hard limitation of WiFi.

It's pretty decently deployed as far as I'm aware and I've yet to find anything that is in the same class without getting into some of the more esoteric modulation schemes(although LoRA is pretty impressive on it's own, for instance the different spread factors are orthogonal so you can have multiple devices transmitting at the same time without colliding if they use different coding rates).

I've found the AT modem command[3] based modules[1][2] to be fairly drop-in and usable, I was even able to pair via BT on my phone and use the BT serial TTY to send/recv without any specific software. It's pretty hard to beat ~$20 modules that you can just drop in and run over UART.

Keep in mind these are mostly for point-to-point although if I remember correctly you can also configure them for a standard LoRA deployment through that command interface as well.

[1] https://store.rakwireless.com/products/rak4200-evaluation-bo...

[2] https://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-E5-mini-STM32WLE5JC-p-4869....

[3] https://docs.rakwireless.com/Product-Categories/WisDuo/RAK42...

I used a pair of EZ-Bridge Ultra5 5GHz repeater dishes to traverse a 350' link from a main house to an outbuilding. The dishes are rated for a 4 mile link, but there are trees in the way so it worked out. A single linear link, so not a mesh, but FYI...