Good afternoon, I would like to know (approximately) how many nodes this Gateway is capable of supporting. Is there any way to know? How many nodes is it capable of supporting if the nodes transmit 1 time per minute? If I have 100 nodes… will I have data collisions?
The same as all other similarly configured and specified GW’s that use the same silicon and offer same number of channels (8). Basically its a “how long is a piece of string” question!
Actual performance of ANY gateway is a function of the local environment (which will set noise floor and any interferers - and their type) and the statistical spread of timing and channel frequency and sf allocation of the pool of nodes in range…there are many academic papers around this, most wrong and few that then cope with real world deployments - which can then be purturbed by the availability of other GW’s in the area (its a classic example of chaos theory in action!). The need and demand for GW’s to handle downlinks (of any kind) - again largely dictated by the actions and behaviour of the nodes in range…will also have major impact on reception capacity - basically capacity for node reception is zero during the time that a GW is required to Tx as system essentially simplex. For that reason on the community network we have a FUP that is far tighter than is ‘permitted’ by local regulations - remember where regulations are concern its a case of just because you can that doesnt mean you should…its shared spectrum after all! WRT FUP if you are thinking Tx per minute per node you really need to start reading up as well as evaluating your use case and application set up…basically don’t! 
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It’s just maths - you’ve 8 channels it can listen on, once per minute, but as we don’t know the size of the payload and what the distribution of devices in terms of distance plus the terrain or indoors.
Without the additional info, the lengths of string are too numerous to be worth counting.
If you are thinking of transmitting once every 60 seconds, then if you are TTN the answer is irrelevant as your account will be disabled pending your move to a TTI instance.
Once per minute very considerably exeeds the fair useage limit for TTN.
Maybe contact TTI for a paid access ?
Right now, I’m doing tests with sending every 1 minute to see how far the infrastructure can hold up and how many nodes the gateway accepts. I have 3 nodes sending every 20 seconds and so far I haven’t had any problems. But when I have the rest of the project defined, I will configure the nodes to emit every 5 or 10 minutes
Please turn the nodes off.
If you want to ‘load testing’ then you need to contact TTI and pay for all the network resources you are using.
You are breaching the FUP of the community network and potentially causing denial of service for other users. STOP NOW!
Contact TTI with your requirements, they have plenty of experience with their customers to help out. Your project sounds commercial and in that case you should get a paid for instance anyway.
Hello 
Officer, I wasn’t sure if this motorway was fully rated to go a twice the legal limit so I thought I’d just give it a try to make sure before driving normally. But I’m not sure if my engine can stand it, so if you could be patient whilst I just run it at 5,000 rpm for twenty minutes. After that, I’m going to ask some experts what they think. But I’ll do the tests first just in case they don’t know.
I thought I could do tests at home by buying a node and an indoor gateway,
And you can, but if you want to use the community servers, you need to adhere to the Fair Use Policy.
You can also do tests at the office and outdoors and in public venues - your location doesn’t matter, it’s which servers you use that matter.
As for tests, what are you testing? The whole setup is well exercised. If you want hands on experience, it’s more about your learning than starting out with an objective of reprogramming a perfectly good gateway before you’ve seen what it all does first.
But your not just testing ‘at home’.
You will be using a pile of network services and servers that TTI pay for and support. The people who are paying for the resources you are using set limits on how much of their resources you can use for free.
I have searched the TTN website but I have not found its use policies. Could you tell me where they are so I can study them?
You can’t have tried very hard:
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/search?q=Fair%20Use%20Policy
Plus the documentation link bottom right of every console page and the Learn link at the top of the page.
More importantly forget any TTN/server/FUP limits what you are proposing is anti-social, plain and simple….before it gets to the gw or onward to the servers your little experiment will be burning up the most precious resource of all…. The shared RF spectrum that we all have to use and share and which has finite capacity. Even if local regulatory limits might allow abussive and unwarranted heavy duty cycles you need to stop and think do I need to do this and why. Remember, even if working at home it’s LoRa… as in Long Range….and users potentially many kilometres even tens of kilometres away will have your little test inflicted on them. ALL gateways in range will be automatically allocating internal electronic and s/w resources to handling your excessely generated messages…. 
In a previous post it was suggested;
“Once per minute very considerably exeeds the fair useage limit for TTN”
Try a Google search on ‘fair useage limit for TTN’
my idea is to make an uplink every 15 minutes with 1byte of data per node. I think that complies with the policy
an uplink takes me 0.118sec, x (24Hx 4 messages/hour) = 11,328 seconds/day. I think I’m not doing anything wrong to anyone
Really?
Check the console:
And
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/duty-cycle/#fair-use-policy
That could be within FUP depending on spreading factor being used (you optimistically assume the best). However you wrote you are currently testing with very different parameters.
How did you figure that timing out?
Not at that guessed timing, but like many other discussions in a similar manner on here, all we ask is that you learn about the technology properly, particularly if you are going to use community servers, which would not be appropriate for 100 nodes, so perhaps best if you talk to @rish1 at TTI about your requirements.
consumed airtime
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