Hi there.
While trying to deploy a new LoraWAN device in a city, I realized there are ZERO gateways in the whole city, I would be in charge of getting the signal out there.
I can’t spend much on hardware, as this is a totally prototyping/proof of concept project, what would be the chepest compliant gateway around? I don’t care if it’s DIY based on a arduino/ESP/… board, I’m used to this. And I don’t mind if it’s only indoors as I would find a suitable enclosure.
I know the classic Heltec ESP32-Lora Board would WORK, but is 100% discouraged due to having only one channel
It is a LoRa media converter or a single channel packet forwarder but it NOT a LoRaWAN Gateway…it may offer some level of limited functionality within a LoRaWAN network but that would be more by good luck and timing on specific Channels or SF’s rather than by consistent design and as likely as not for every instance where it might function there will probably be potential of atleast 7 and potentially 47 instances where it wont work…effectively implementing a form of denial of service attack on other legitimate users in the same coverage area who aren’t attuned to the abominations nominal behaviour! Nuff said !
A TTIG is as good and as cheap as any/many other low cost devices if, as it seems, you are having problems with your LPS8, and could be viewed better than many as at least it runs BasicStation which is generally considered a step up in reliability and security than basic UDP based implementations. Personally run lots of both with no significant issues to shout about but as they say - you pay your money and you make your choice… I have far more problems with full GWs and devices running in areas where someone ignores all advice and deploys or has historically deployed a single channel trouble generator
So your project will fail if people buy devices starting from €30 for a Dragino water leak sensor to €100 for something sophisticated, if you’ve told people that their sensors will be heard but you’ve been too cheap about a gateway.
All gateways have a chip set from Semtech. More up to date chip sets are less power hungry and just a tiny bit more sensitive. Weatherproof cases cost more, so the getting started value for money route is a mid-range indoor gateway ~€150 at the top of a building with a short run of high quality antenna cable to a high quality antenna on a pole above a tall building on a hill. No hill, no worries. Not many tall buildings, do your best, a TTIG with the external antenna hack is better than a mid-range gateway with a poor antenna setup.
And then map the area using TTN Mapper so you can publish a map of coverage so people don’t start thinking they can put a device in their washing machine in the basement and get a signal through. When you are mapping, remember it’s Line of Sight - so 5km away but you can see the antenna through a rolled up newspaper is better than 500m away behind another building.
And some help with getting setup on TTN & linking to a dashboard will make for some really useful use cases. Be modest, get some use cases going and then ask for funding and put more gateways in place.
Nuff said !
