Hello
Just joined the Cambridge UK community. No posts for a while, is this community still active? Would like some advice regarding local gateways.
Go for it! 
There are a fair number of GWs in the wider community area but others always welcome. The Community achieved âOfficialâ status late 2019 and had a great kick off meeting and exhibition, with a number of active members and supporters, where I managed to attend late on. Unfortunately, I think they ran straight into Covid and lockdowns in early 2020, with activity stalling and havent recovered much since⌠a common problem especially in university towns where there can be rotation of members and support.
@richardpa @evensri Have you guys dropped a direct message through the community pages - not necessarily through the Forum - to the initiators or active members like Rob? A quick prompt that there are others waiting to get active may help spur on. (Link them to this thread on the Forum 
) ⌠I know as an initiator myself for several communities it can sometime be disheartening if others dont chime in and get active or just drift away
As a key UK technology hub having LoRaWAN (& TTN!) well represented in the Cambridge area is a must do⌠I may be able to chip in a GW for any users willing to host if interested - did testing & coverage mapping myself in the area years ago centered on the Science Park and area around the Hinton junction and St Johns Innovation Centre, mapping to the north of Cambridge and along the A roads so would be good to see more permanent deployments. Some of the Uni colleges were being used to host GWâs also but I dont currently see them on the map.
There were Digital Catapult GWâs in the area also at one point but may have dropped post transition to V3 this time last year - I will follow up with the team there and see if anything still in place - not all were migrated as I found out a month or two back⌠Maybe they have moved over to the Janet Network deployment? (I need to see if we can get them peering through PB in that caseâŚ)
Or whatâs worth what?
If you want to get data via LoRaWAN, you get that via your gateway. If you have a wired or WiFi backhaul at your mast, then there is no real cost to you to have it on TTN and put out the message to people near by that they can make use of it. This comes with automatic silver level halo.
If you want to go for gold, then re-start the community.
Platinum haloâs for those that get local schools to join in.
And if you put something with a standard LoRa chip, you can join in high altitude balloon tracking too!
As far as TTN goes, there is no point in using an âantenna with some awesome gainâ.
Wow, they really pushed the boat out with that marketing fest.
There is one source of supply for LoRa chips in the world - so with a few very rare exceptions they all do the same job, including the visit from the authorities with the awesome gain antenna - forum search will explain the details but basically youâd have to dial back the gateway power to stay legal and then youâve skewed the antennaâs polar bear (I think thatâs what the antenna boyz say).
The Waveshare HAT is just another HAT but needs a Pi under it which would be better not to be running off an SD Card as they tend to die when used 24/7/365 etc etc - YMMV. It may well be a rebranded Dragino which may well be someone elseâs work, itâs hard to tell, at least the Seeed module looks slightly different.
Assuming you can waterproof whatever you buy (as you were looking at a HAT), then a TTIG is a good starting place and as low cost as you can get, but WiFi only and doesnât have any buttons or lights or similar (well, one LED) - but thatâs a good thing, LoRaWAN gateways are appliances. If you want to âexperimentâ then itâs not good to connect to TTN aka TTS CE as it disrupts coverage whilst you are trying stuff.
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It may be worth considering that thereâs not much to experiment with LoRaWAN - itâs a defined standard with legal boundaries on the RF - you get a gateway, use a 3dBi antenna as high & as clear as possible, set the gateway setting to account for the cable & the antenna and, erm, thatâs it.
Then you crack on with deploying sensors and maybe mapping coverage to make appropriate adjustments and/or deploy further gateways.
On the other hand, off topic for this forum, you could use plain LoRa to try out stuff. Depends really what you want to achieve.
In the context of antennas, there is a common view from those with some RF experience, that you can improve reception range, as in allowing the reception of nodes further away, by improving the Gateway antenna.
However in the UK, and most places in the World, the Gateways are already oprating at the legal maximum ERP, so a âbetterâ antenna requires you to reduce the Gateway transmit power. So a âbetterâ antenna has made no differerance âŚ
Even if the Gateway had seperate TX and RX antennas, by using a high gain antenna on the RX side only, you have created a one-way system for those distant nodes, i.e. the Gateway can receive packets from the distant nodes but the nodes cannot receive packets from the Gateway.
TTN\LoRaWAN requires that nodes can receive as well as transmit packets.
Also note that whilst you might find easy build designs for co-linear antennas on-line, I have built a couple, and when I did real World tests to check the horizontal gain, they performed a fair bit worse than an uber simple 1\4 wave vertical with radials.
LoRaWAN, as said above, is a network with a tightly defined standard. If you are coming from a Radio Amateur background, thereâs not much to try out and anything you do try needs to be on a private network so it doesnât impact community network users.
With over 181,000 members on TTN with 21,000 gateways & tens of millions of messages passed a day, this isnât exactly a clique club, just that it doesnât fit your expectations or understanding of what it is about.
Nick (& indeed the community at large) are not trying to disuade you from experimenting, just to do so within the limits and boundaries set by the LoRaWAN secification - as used for TTN - and local radio limits. On the Community and the TTN Forum there are a great many radio hams and HAB enthusiasts who work within the limits, but continue to push the boundaries of knowledge and best practice if not the limits of the specs and who do so with regard to
It is very easy for a science experiment to have consequences not considered by the initiators. So please read up extensively on what is common good practice and what is required for compliant behaviour. There are many many use cases tested and developed on TTN before moving off to production platforms elsewhere - be they TTS based or using competing LNS services - so it is very much seen as a prototyping and, within the limits outlined, an experimental platform.
Sadly some networks run in a different way and with different ârewardsâ or incentives. TTN is about the Communty and providing effective area coverage and mutual overlap and support/redundancy where possibe - a collaborative approach! Other such as e.g. Helium actually incentivise by having the GWâs be able to talk to each other and challenge others, rather than focus on area coverage capability. A lot of Googling (or such other search engine of your choice) may therefore give the wrong impression wrt how to operate and behave on a LoRaWAN network (note whilst LoRa/LoRaWAN based H has their own spin and twist on the standards!). This has led many to assume a âgoodâ GW is one with e.g. a 8-12-15dbi ant on a mountaintop that can see over the local horizon and begger they neighbour wrt challenges, witnessing and long distance at the expense of real world coverage in the immediate locality. As a Ham you will appreciate that additional gain comes with some basic physics/RF/enginnering compromises & trade-offs - notches and null points in the (polar plot) gain out to the main beam aim point, potential accidental (even deliberate) beam up/down tilt etc. which all serve to compromise the Community coverage and can lead to errant node behaviour in proximity of the GW. (Note: There is a reason why the emergency services, unless targeting a specific remote access need, typically use simple antennas giving good overall coverage, as close as possible/practical to basic iso-tropic radiation patterns - typically around 2-3.15dbi.)
If you can get height (as mentioned above) with a longer feed and therefore achieve a better overall coverage and avoid local obsticles etc at the cost of loosing another 1 ,2 or 3 db of signal strength (TX + RX to keep symetric) then a good quality say 5/5.8dbi ant may be warranted at the limits - if polar plots show good coverage with limited/no notching etc.- to compensate for the ant feeder loss. Beyond that as Stuart points out in many places, and indeed in Cambridge UK! you simply have to compensate by dialing down the TX power - its then a zero sum game.
By almeans experiment with LoRa only or a private LORaWAN instance - but PLEASE remember its shared spectrum and LoRaWAN is a broadcast mechanism with all antenna (GW or Nodes) in range hearing yur experiments and having to allocate internal resource and backhaul bandwidth and back end LNS processing power to deal with the messge - even if not ânativeâ.
In the case of your split RF path above, whist possible/practical it offer no significant benefit and is potentially more expensive and disruptive. If your GW equiped with a higher gain ant hears a remote sensor it may do so with a higher signal than a more appropriate GW closer to the node, yours may get selected by the LNS as the prefered GW to service that node, this would especially be the case if you are on a faster, or should that be lower latency, backhaul connection to the LNS than the ideal gw closer to the node, allowing your handled message to arrive at the LNS many 10âs or even 100âs ms earlier. Problem then is e.g. node powers up and initiates a join request⌠your and closer GW both hear and pass to LNS. LNS chooses your GW to send the join Acc and subsequent MAC commands/settings⌠issue is as your GW now has an assymetric RF stage it Txâs but is just out of range of the node (actually 8dbm difference is quite a bit of range!)âŚwhich would have heard the other (sysmetric RF path) GW. In that case the node never gets to join the network! In the case of currently operational & joined devices when you fire up your assymetric system it perturbs all the RX stats in the area and whilst a new GW is generally considered good as it helps âdensifyâ the network, potentially allowing nodes in the area to adjust to the new scenario by reducing SF and thereby reducing power consumption and expending life in service, an assymetric GW will potentially serve to cause nodes to drop out and if recovering, may comeback in worse condition than before⌠as NIck says disruptive to the network.
TL:DR - Please put up your GW and join it to TTN, just be responsible and âawareâ of how it will work
BTW IIRC the day of the Cambridge launch âpartyâ mini exhibition Nov '19 I was late in as that afternoon I had been over N/NEast of Ely for a meeting (somewhere near Littleport IIRC) with a company/systems integrator/distributor who had LoRaWAN as part of their offering - primarily for AgriTech-biz - I need to go and dig out 3+ year old notes! So you may well find other potential LoRaWAN fellow travellers in your area⌠if I find anything I will DM youâŚ
Took me a while to type this between other tasks and have just seen follow up messages⌠please be considerate of the fact that Forum moderators and experienced users are trying to help you and steer you towards a rewarding and useful experience with TTN, whilst minimising newbie (in LoRaWAN context) disruptions You might want to reconsider your last post in that context
A quick reminder
Just 'cause you cant hear them doent mean they cant hear you! Lo(ng)Ra(nge), in flat areas like parts of Cambridgeshire and East Anglia signal can go a LONG way - especially if with any height involved âŚ
As they say perception is reality! If that is your perception then thats a pity⌠hate to loose potential community members and GWâs
I guess there are some 15-20k active members out of the global 150k+ registered who might disagree and have a different perception
Not really - its a development platform for deploying and learning LoRaWAN and implementing a global community network - I think from TTI perspective, cant speak for them as just a community member myself, it acts a a shop window and LNS/Service development vehicle, but one that costs them money so hardly commercialâŚI know other users who have sunk a lot of money into the community with GWâs, time, effort, meet-ups, training etcâŚall at a cost and pro bono & at a loss - so hardly a commercial proposition! 
Like you
I take a " (If you build it, they will come philosophy) " and currently have around 50 GWâs under my own user ID,sadly including a few stuck on old V2 post covid that I havent got round to, have given away/sourced supplied another 150+ In UK/EU/Global and supported probably another 3-500 globally get online, have intiated many Communities and assist/contribute to many other etc. all pro bona and at a cost well >ÂŁ50k (accountant tries to tell me more but I dont listen! 
) - that is not a commercial offering and is certainly âcommunityâ contribution from my perspective (my reality!).
Correction : people dont want it to be disrupted surely a natural view for those using and invested in the community and the network
Why would we declare that when clearly and per the TTN Manifesto and operation that is exactly what it isâŚ
Sad to hear you dont feel able to contribute and help build, but that is your free choice - I would ask you to reconsider⌠and perhaps zoom in and check out the GW coverage North and East of Cambs - https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/map - much provided by the adjacent Norfolk CC - and see how and where you might add/contribute. Have been thinking of an Ely Community initiation since BC, hence testing out that way previously, and per above could offer an additional GW from my reserve stock if a good site can be foundâŚ
If you still wish to delete account (we Modâs dont have account speciifc access) then that should be done from the main TTN site account rather than via the ForumâŚnote: your ability to delete/edit posts on forum is time limited as then becomes part of the Community Forum record I see just now you have been stepping back doing soâŚ
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You asked if it was worth it, I was saying what makes it worth it in the context of the TTN community - which is not a tangent, it seems it was just not the answer you were expecting.
Lots of low cost sensor nodes collating data on an area can become a very powerful tool leading to some inspirational changes to an area in so many areas.
We donât evaluate sites on a case by case basis, anyone can setup a gateway, no permission required and it is an open network. But as Iâve already suggested, I think you may have thought there was a whole pile of RF based stuff going on - which it isnât really and the opportunities to do RF stuff in the context of âbuild a colinear antenna with some awesome gainâ isnât a good thing for an active network, nor is the split RF paths. We could unpack the detail on that if you want to understand more.
Perhaps worth giving an example of what might be disrupted:
Local water course level sensors that provide flood warnings.
And its neither.
TTN is a community network provided on a free to use basis, within limits.
Its well established so not a development network.
Since the servers are provided by the community, and there is no service level agreement on those or the infrastructure provided free of charge by TTI, its not appropriate to use TTN for critical infrastructure.
Nothing on the map does not necessarily mean there isnât something there. Some gateway owners prefer not to share the location of their gateways. However if you have a node (== end device) correctly configured and no traffic is shown in the TTN console chances are high the map is right.
As there is no SLA it canât be mission critical. However that does not imply anyone can do whatever they want. What would your reaction be if your nodes that worked perfectly alright for months on end suddenly started misbehaving and you would no longer receive the data? You would probably at least spend hours trying to figure what went wrong. And image that happened because another community user decided to start experimenting even thought they knew it would disrupt communications for others in the vicinity. Would that be community friendly behavior?
What we as a community ask is to refrain form knowingly disruptive experiments and test. Otherwise feel free to experiment and test. And please share what you learn with the community because there are plenty of members that know where to get help but very few helping out or sharing their learnings.
PS. I just notices I need to zoom to street level to find some of my gateways. I can find them because I know they are there, not because the map shows anything when looking at city level.
In the Cambridge area there are a few active gateways, so dependent if these are indoor or outdoor and your location. You might get connectivity via them, other wise like most of us add an gateway or two 
. And see the others as infill for your gateways (but donât depend on them)
That is a consequence of changes implemented byTTI teamin the wind down of V2 and before the sunset with V3 effectively a fresh startâŚunfortunately its a consequence of new implementation and lack of a central/global NOC, we were promised some of these old features (user names et al) would be re-implemented once V3 âsettledâ but we are still waiting 
Not knowing who is kinda a challenge for community cohesion and communicationsâŚI often see new GWâs in Communities where I am initiator but them cant contact user directly to âjoinâ 
Its still alive - and I know of many nodes happily pinging away and passing messages through the (visible and invisible) GWâs around Cambs⌠As to the GWâs the community page is colour codedâŚblue = alive/active, red = alive but not seen as active for a period (typically 24hrs these days but can be a few hours to a few days!) if a previous GW drops off the map it has not been seen by the backend as handling messages or passing status updates for ~1 month! Believe the main map I linked to shows GWâs seen in the last approx 2 weeks⌠IIRC.
Nope sorry - critical means go for SLA on a private or hosted TTS instance - on TTN GWâs can come and go as users turn on/off or moveâŚprefer not to happen but its a fact of life!
Development network in the sense that the network is pretty stable and resiliant and aften many years can largely be trusted as something that just worksâŚwhilst you develop your sensors/nodes! (Just make sure that they follow FUP and good behaviour etc )
Feel we are going circular now⌠either join us or move on - your call! Would love to see you join and deploy then everyone benefits
p.s. just checked logs from the trip to Cambs/Ely Nov 2019 and spotted a slow update gps tracker in the car got a hit up North of Ely
Sadly back then once you got someway north of the Milton interchange up the A10 the higher ground served to mask car height signals from getting back to the Cambridge GWâs⌠I must come back and re-map soon in the New YearâŚ
I appear to have created some confusion around the definition of âmission critical infrastrucureâ that has been mis-attributed.
Itâs pretty normal for a TTN Community to run flood warning sensors or some such. The up time & general reliability of TTS CE aka TTN is better than most paid for services. But such flood warning is to supplement the sensors run by the Environment Agency who feel the need to charge communities (who have paid for those sensors via taxation) a chunk of change for a data feed that pays for several LoRaWAN sensors with a far more direct notification system.
Temperature, air quality, remote monitoring, itâs all out there. Either as an adjunct to an official system or isnât âmission criticalâ however you may define that. But nothing directly connected to pacemakers or some such.
MOD Comment: If this thread appears a bit disjointed or fragmented it is because richardpa requested his account be deleted - he deleted his own posts and I have obliged by deleting his Forum accountâŚ
⌠moving on!..