NSW NPWS x Myriota - Satellite People Counter Pilot

NSW National Parks manages hundreds of remote sites far beyond mobile-network reach - backcountry campgrounds, isolated lookouts, wilderness entry points - where the LoRaWAN approach used at Jindabyne is not viable. The agency needed to understand whether Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite IoT could close that connectivity gap and enable visitor analytics at off-grid locations, and how reliable, latency-sensitive, and cost-effective such a deployment would be in practice.

• ✓Partnered with Myriota, an Australian LEO-satellite IoT operator, whose constellation is engineered for small-payload data transmission from remote devices
• ✓Selected two pilot sites: a controlled metropolitan site (a national park in Sydney) for baseline testing, and a remote off-grid site (a viewing platform in Southern NSW with no mobile coverage) representative of the target operational use case
• ✓Integrated the Myriota satellite module with the people-counter hardware via custom firmware, encoded count data into Myriota's tight payload format, and synchronised transmission with expected satellite-pass windows
• ✓Designed a cloud-side ingestion path to receive relayed data from the Myriota ground station and surface it in a dashboard alongside the existing LoRaWAN visitor data
• ✓Iterated on antenna positioning, payload structure, and power management to address intermittent transmission issues at the remote site

• →Pilot did not achieve reliable end-to-end data transmission - but produced a clear, documented set of evidence-based findings that informed NPWS's broader IoT strategy
• →Confirmed that current LEO satellite IoT is best-suited to delay-tolerant, low-frequency data (e.g. daily visitor totals, environmental sensor readings) - not real-time visitor counting at southern Australian latitudes
• →Quantified the firmware, power-budget, and antenna-positioning complexity that should be reflected in budget and timeline estimates for similar projects
• →Recommended a hybrid architecture for NPWS: LoRaWAN for connected sites, satellite IoT for delay-tolerant remote use cases, and a planned re-test as Myriota's constellation expands
• →Saved the agency from committing to a larger satellite IoT rollout on unproven technology - the explicit value of an honest, well-documented pilot