I was hoping for some QRP (low-power) transmissions... but not. I just looked quickly at the video, but as far as I understand they used 500 W of output power and 8-m dishes. People are doing EME (bouncing signals on the moon) on the same frequency with as low as 5 W of power and a 1.5m dish (see https://hb9q.ch/2018/?page_id=37).

qrp off the moon @ the path loss is insane

It definitely is... but people do it!

But these are college kids. Cut them some slack.

They haven't even sent any signals yet. They got as far as using a spectrum analyzer to verify they're outputting on the correct frequency.

Apples and oranges. Those numbers are for a 50 Hz bandwidth mode. LoRa is 125 kHz, so it has a 34 dB disadvantage.

Also, those numbers require the HB9Q 50 foot dish to be at the other end.

LoRa (long range radio) is different from LoRA (low rank adaptation of LLMs).

Don't upvote this, it's just an annotation for HN to disambiguate two currently popular concepts.

I had to look up the definition of the acronym to be sure. "LoRa" as a term is definitely over subscribed.

Don't forget Level Of Repair Analysis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_Repair_Analysis

Their advisor is Al Katz, K2UYH whose been doing EME for as long as I can remember.