Thinking of following this…
Any user experiences or hints or tips
Looking to get something so our group can test out our IoT ideas
I did build it some time ago, used experimenters board and solder the connections between Raspberry and IC880 board with short wires. Already running for several months without any trouble on 8MHz spi and without watchdog…
tip => don’t use long wires for the interconnect…
Succes !
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I’ve made a PCB for this, just tested and installed yesterday, does works fine, check dedicated github repo
I have two gateways running without problems.
Had some problems in the beginning, but with a metal enclosure and disabling WIFI and Bluetooth everything works reliable.
impressive antenna what kind of range are you getting - where did you get the antenna from ?
@johnmiddleton: It’s this antenna:
Range is here:
http://ttnmapper.org/?gateway=B827EBFFFEB4B18A&type=radar
But the range is very dependent on the height of the antenna. This one is at "residential home height’ 
@johnmiddleton Bear in mind that an antenna doesn’t make any power, so the ‘gain’ is achieved by flattening the vertical radiation pattern. Depending on where you want to site your gateway, you may be better with a quarter or half wave antenna. The antenna above wouldn’t be much use for nodes underneath it!
Thanks I am reading up on this as we speak - I don’t know very much about this - much to learn!
Advantages of being a radio ham !
Thinking of suggesting
http://webshop.imst.de/ic880a-spi-lorawan-concentrator-868mhz.html
http://webshop.imst.de/pigtail-for-ic880a-spi-and-ic880a-usb.html and
http://webshop.imst.de/antenna-for-ic880a-usb-and-ic880a-spi.html
at least for testing in this box
https://www.aerial.net/shop/product/1102/ezynet-outdoor-enclosure-1-ethernet.html
What did you mean by “that antenna wouldn’t be much use for nodes underneath it”? We got an 8dBi antenna from the Taoglass(http://www.taoglas.com/product/barracuda-omb-868-08f21-868mhz-8dbi-omni-directional-outdoor-antenna/) and located it to the roof of our building on the 4th floor. Nodes can join to the network and send confirmed messages successfully from the ground floor of the building. Should we worry about this situation as I don’t have much knowledge about the antennas and rf? In fact, we couldn’t go far from 1.5kilometres with this setup. I am still suspicious and a little disappointed for not being able to get a coverage bigger than 1.5km using an 8dBi antenna. Do you think this is normal?
I meant that the least sensitive part of the radiation pattern is directly above and directly underneath the antenna. Most of the radiation goes out parallel to the antenna.
If yet to conduct real world tests myself, so not sure if 1.5km is OK or not. It doesn’t sound too bad.
Just make sure that the connection between your antenna and your gateway board is as short as possible with good quality coaxial cable.
Thanks for the answer.
I understand now that I shouldn’t worry about the position of the antenna as it must be OK since the node has a distance in a parallel direction.
We had to use a coaxial cable in order to fit the gateway’s antenna connection type. Then I should better try to lower the distance between the antenna and the gateway and also test it with some other coaxial cables.
I’m running a R-Pi-based IMST ic880a setup for Monmouth TTN here in the UK.
It’s now deployed using Docker and Resin.io (see https://www.mockingbirdconsulting.co.uk/2017/08/02/automating-internet-things-deployments/ for more on this and the code behind it) and it’s been solid for months.
The only thing I would say is use one of the backplane boards as they’ll reduce the likelihood of interference.