Dear TTN Community,
as one of our community member is involved in the upgrade of a wind turbine, we were thinking about putting a gateway on it. I know there
are better places for a gateway from an EMI/radio perspective but
other traits make up for that on this given location.
We are looking to get in touch with people / TTN communities who have
done something similar before so we can learn from your experience. Do you happen to know any TTN Communities who run a gateway on such a tower?
I donât see a problem with it. Is the tower a monopole configuration or a lattice work tower? My only concern would be a monopole and getting enough horizontal separation to not have as significant of a RF shadow from mounting your antenna right beside the pole. I donât think that you need to be concerned about EMI from the turbine generator unless you are strapping it right to the housing.
@carlanwray thanks for your reply. It is a monopole configuration. RF shadow will be interesting especially if the antenna will be mounted on the nacelle and thus moving with the direction of the wind. The blades will do some obstruction / diffraction as well. EMI problems will originate primarily from lightning and the static the blades are generating. So of course it will have to be made part of the lightning protection gear. Some of these issues could be avoided by mounting the gateway close to the base of the tower. But there, RF shadow will be a bigger issue. Another question is how to mount the antenna. Apparently you canât just drill a hole in the structure for structural stability reasons. I have heard of an LTE antenna being mounted on the tower structure with strong magnets. But that one only needed to face the next base station and could be close to the tower. So atm, I am seeing two viable options: putting two gateways/antennas on opposite sides of the base of the tower (the towerâs location is quite exposed) or one at the nacelleâs bottom side.
That might be troublesome for ADR, when devices have been told that they can improve their transmissions (lower power, lower SF) and the direction changes?
@arjanvanb thanks, you are absolutely right. That would cause too much harm and confusion. Having two gateways with overlapping fields mounted to the nacelle might be problematic as well while their direction is shifting. Upstream messages would be received alright but a down stream message might go out via a gateway that just rotated out of view of the node it is addressing.
I guess it comes down to âthe pillars of the network should not moveâ.
Iâve done mag mounts but strap mounting would probably be best in that case. How tall of a structure is this? (I operate a small microwave network so Iâve played with a lot of different mounts over the years) And while I have not worked with LoRaWAN specifically for very long, unless this is a giant structure, I donât think that with a 50 cm standoff on a 30 cm diameter pole it is going to cause much of a âshadowâ at 800-900 mhz.
Itâs a 40m rotor on a 44m tower. The towerâs diameter is in the several meters range. As long as the shadow is not moving, we could handle it by just using two overlapping fields of view from two antennas.
That makes more sense now, I didnât expect you to have access to that large of a unit. We have lots of smaller wind turbines here along with the larger ones so I wasnât sure what you were dealing with. If you could mount it on top of the nacelle I donât think the turbine blades would cause that much of an issue as they are mounted, what, a couple meters forward of the back of the nacelle? (assuming that there is a service entrance on the top, Iâm going off of the 100 m units we have around here) Iâve considered mounting some 5Ghz equipment behind a smaller turbine blade but decided against it as the propagation at the higher frequencies is much narrower.
If anyone is looking at very large âinfrastructureâ turbines vs small scale domestic/office/agri- turbines then you may find they have an âAâ frame or similar structure at opposite end of generator body/nacele from the blades that is often used/can be used to mount an antenna - usually these are used for turbine monitoring or inter turbine links. Considered far enough away from the blades for fading/shadowing to be considered not material to overall coverage benefit. Have proposed LoRaWAN deployments at a number of these sites in North of England or inshore, where cellular coverage was poor and having some level of IoT monitoring (typically agricultural or remote worker monitoring), though these were early stage coverage reviews and proposals for systems integrator clients and dont know if any were then rolled out - will try to find out Also know at least one company involved in turbine installation/maintenance/repair was looking at LoRa (not LoRaWAN - was several years ago!) for a point to multipoint link system between turbines, and for on blade nodes for structural/stress monitoring (latter as part of a research project) in a deployed array⌠I moved on before seeing results so again will try to find out what happened thereâŚ
On small scale systems a GW mounted partway up with actual antenna mounted offset on an arm several wavelengths out from âpoleâ/support structure but well clear of the blade path/arc would likely not suffer too much shadowing or purtubation, and if in a good location consider several GWs with directional (e.g. quadrant or arc) antenna coverage?
Was compiling my responce wrt large size deployments and grabbing/editing images so didnt see your size update - that is exactly what I was thinking of!.. go for it!
BTW where in the world are you? <- Ignore just looked you up and see TTN Stuttgart! Just do it and add to coverage If results below expectation you can always take kit out again
@Jeff-UK thanks. Will do. These turbines just pose some different challenges from the tv-towers or lookouts we have used before. Keep us posted about your rotors as well. I have also seen a paper about an antenna mount in the rotor hub. But @arjanvanb is right, the LoRaWAN backend doesnât like swinging converage at all. @carlanwray will have to get info from the owner about the possibility to go topside.
We are just trying to understand the challenges before going into talks with the company doing the upgrade (they need to be involved).
Have previously talked to some of the âriggersâ maintining/installing these systems and impression is they are are a competent bunch and VERY safety conscious⌠fact is if you plan correctly with them and pre-stage/mock up build on theground then supply them a kit they should be able to do a competent job on the actual install (they often deal with other radio kit as I mentioned earlier), so should be no need for you to go up - unless you fancy catching the view! Likley they will advise you on what is needed for long term resilient install and strapping stuff down as they know how exposed it can get up there - a bit like the guys who do broadcast mast builds that you have likely come acrossâŚ
What Jeff said. Nacelle mounting if possible. I know a few riggers around here and they can take care of the mounting if you are not a climber. Not sure it would be practical for the return to try mounting below the Nacelle at that height as getting there unless there are climbing rungs is difficult. All the best.
If I ever get the chance I would like that very much.
Since this is a small installation by todayâs standards I am not sure how the upper side of the nacelle is built/equipped. We need to get that info from the owner. Also talking about going topside: I should have written âtaking the installation to the topside instead of elsewhereâ, my apologies for not making that clear.
Hi @msei, I have carefully read all the posts and having put a lot of equipment on towers I would only suggest a few additional things:
Make sure the tower owner/operator grants you formal access (not âbuddy accessâ) and make sure that the engineering and insurance people are fully informed and are ok with your equipment being in place.
Think about maintenance access. Itâs expensive to get crews in so plan ahead.
Make sure that you can power-cycle the equipment from the base of the tower without climbing.
Make sure that you have diagnostic access, e.g. a console port, from the base of the tower without climbing.
Try to include some high-power weatherproof status LEDs on the outside of the equipment that can be seen from the ground at night using binoculars.
Think about running a WiFi access point from the equipment so that you can access it from the ground away from the tower.
@cultsdotelecomatgmai We had some of these points on our list already but those missing are definitely worth adding. Thanks for sharing your experience here.
Also for the others posting here: Thanks, thatâs exactly the advise I was hoping for.
I should have listed all of that but having done this for so long I kinda forget the things that I just do. Iâm in the process of overlaying LoRaWAN over our 500+ km² microwave network and building our own sensors for AG and I keep running into the awareness that things will go wrong because there are things that I have not yet learned the hard way and yet I have to go through. I guess thatâs a fact of getting older.
Also know at least one company involved in turbine installation/maintenance/repair was looking at LoRa (not LoRaWAN - was several years ago!) for a point to multipoint link system between turbines, and for on blade nodes for structural/stress monitoring (latter as part of a research project) in a deployed array⌠I moved on before seeing results so again will try to find out what happened thereâŚ
If results below expectation you can always take kit out again 
Likley they will advise you on what is needed for long term resilient install and strapping stuff down as they know how exposed it can get up there - a bit like the guys who do broadcast mast builds that you have likely come acrossâŚ