Welcome to the Bir Paragliding Community site. Discover how we’re leveraging technology to enhance pilot safety and improve search and rescue efforts.
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Our trials in the Dhauladhar Range have shown that LoRa Mesh and Trackers are highly effective for tracking pilots and providing communication where cellular or satellite coverage is unavailable. Unlike satellite communication—which is heavily regulated and illegal for private use in India—LoRa technology offers a free, license-free solution.
LoRa (Long Range) is a low-power, long-range communication technology operating in the unlicensed ISM band. When paired with the Meshtastic app on Android and iOS, it enables pilots to share their location over a decentralized mesh network, with each device extending the network’s range.
Over the past few months of testing, we’ve had the pleasure of sharing our findings with the local government participants who play a key role in supporting paraglider pilots. Their enthusiasm for enhancing safety is inspiring, and their continued involvement will be instrumental in advancing Tracker usage for pilot safety. Given that this is a community-driven initiative, their participation is invaluable. There have been discussions about potentially making these LoRa Devices a requirement for pilots flying here, though the outcome is still to be determined. In the meantime, pilots visiting the Dhauladhar Range would benefit from bringing these affordable Meshtastic Trackers along.
In late 2023 and early 2024, community partners set up solar-powered LoRa repeaters across key points in the Dhauladhar Range, ensuring continuous coverage even with low pilot activity. Base stations in Bir and Dharamshala collect location data and send it to a central server. We are currently working on secure, long-term data storage and privacy protection measures.
With the Autumn Season of 2024 we are in the process of adding 14 more repeater and base stations to our existing stations. All these are already either deployed or will be in place by the middle of October 2024. The exact locations are not publicly available but the extent of coverage is pretty good. You can see pilots flying on any day as they fly on the tracker link above.
These stations are managed and taken care of by local Bir based community partners. We thank them all for their public service as no monetary gains are there for them and they are doing all this for public good. Thank You all.