The Round-Up

Field notes, engineering, and research from Open Range Systems—building open telemetry for the open range.

Open data for the open range: why we started Open Range Systems

Reliable, research-grade data is hard to get in remote country. We're building a low-cost, open, satellite-connected system to fix that — and an operating system for the automated ranch.

ConnectivityEngineering

Getting data off a cow past the last cell tower

There is no single best way to track cattle where there is no cell service. Here are the honest tradeoffs between GPS loggers, VHF, LoRaWAN, cellular, legacy satellite, and direct-to-satellite NB-NTN, and which one fits which study.

PowerEngineering

The power budget of a solar cattle tag nobody will ever recharge

Nobody will ever recharge this tag, so power decides everything. Here is the real energy budget: what a GPS fix, a satellite uplink, and an IMU each cost, and how we ration them against a tiny solar income.

BehaviorResearch

Reading cattle behavior off an ear tag, honestly

An accelerometer on a cow’s ear can separate grazing from rumination from calving. But only if you respect the power budget, the satellite link, and how hard the rare events are to label.

Open DataProduct

What “open” actually means for ranch data

Most livestock data is trapped in a closed app. Here's the line we draw: open data and integrations, ranch-grade hardware.

EngineeringConnectivity

Direct-to-satellite is becoming table stakes. The data is the moat.

Satellite connectivity is commoditizing fast. Why we build on open standards — and why validated data, not the radio, is what lasts.

Field NotesResearch

Notes from the proving ground: testing tags on 20,000 acres

What a real, off-grid working ranch teaches you that a lab can't — retention, solar, and the rare events that matter.