Being new to Lorawan I am still trying to work out the best way to implement my network. Can someone tell me what is the advantage if any of connecting my Lorawan sensors and relays to a gateway then forwarding this to the TTN and then on to either aws iot or google cloud, rather then just connecting the sensors etc to a gateway and then straight to aws iot or google cloud?
You don’t connect sensors to a gateway, the devices just transmit, one or more gateways in radio range hear the transmission and pass it on to their Network Server which processes the uplink.
So a device connects to the Network Server, without which you can’t do LoRaWAN, so somewhere in the mix there has to be a LoRaWAN server stack of some sort - which is what TTN provides for free.
Once the data has been received, verified and matched up to an application, the Application Server can forward the data on to AWS or Google.
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Thanks for that.
Can you recommend a device that can see if a gateway is in range, I also need a gateway so I can start my first project, ideally I could do with a gateway that can as well as forwarding the Lorawan sensors to the TTN server provide the decoded info as bacnet points to the locally connected bms system
No such thing - devices transmit, they don’t know if they were heard, except under exceptional circumstances. What you can do is have a device that transmits on a push button and you use your smartphone to watch the console.
Sensors are attached to devices, devices run the LoRaWAN MAC that transmits via the LoRa radio …
Gateways have no knowledge of any decryption keys, indeed they don’t even know if the uplink is meant for their network, they just forward what they hear. But if you have internet, you could have a Pi or similar on top that gets a feed from the application server and passed them them on to the BMS.
Or you could run the whole server on the gateway, not great as there is no backup, and would be very off-topic for this forum which is TTN only.
I am planning to use the following : https://www.waveshare.com/sx1268-433m-lora-hat.htm
to setup a LoraWan Gateway to The Things Network but somehow being novice to this and just starting I am a bit confused on using that Raspi Hat to setup the gateway.
please do correct me if i am wrong in what i have described above.
This module is intended for 433MHz. I am not sure, whether there are 433MHz-gateways in your region. 868 (915) MHz is much more common for TTN.
The module doesn’t look like a gateway, it seems to be intended for building a node.
Search a little bit in this forum, read the documentation of TTN, buy a gateway and a node and have fun.
@stevehamptonsh-contr : There are field-tester e.g. from Adeunis to determin the coverage of your gateway.
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Hey, thank you for the input
As far as my novice knowledge about TTN is concerned the communication frequency matters between the Nodes and gateway…
The backend from a RPI gateway connection to the TTN is over the Internet as it is.
So if my Nodes and TTN gateway is on same frequency i suppose it should not matter.
Please do correct me if I am wrong. 
TTN is a shared community based service, you need to have the Gateway (and nodes) on the agreed frequency plan for your country.
You can not create a gateway using a single channel device. These are not compatible with TTN.
Consider yourself corrected!
It absolutely does matter…as pointed out TTN is a community/shared endeavour and if you use it you need to consider how you are contributing and adding to the community as well as how you can derive benefit 
As pointed out this is a 433mhz device, and if your region is not supported for this frequency by ttn your gw will not receive correct channel plan when installed and registering into the network. Also as @wolf highlighted this is indeed a device node hat not a LoRaWAN gw hat (aka concentrator). Uses an SX126x based device and I would caution that for diy use library support for LoRaWAN libraries for this generation is still quite immature depending on development environment, though there are some tasty commercial devices around using SX126x as stand alone product, integrated into modules/SIPs and even integrated Si devices, we see new devices announced almost monthly. Use this to create a node if you must but do not attempt to create a gw using it and connect to TTN…you will only end up with a non compliant Single Channel Packet Forwarder (SCPF)…search forum. This are disruptive to you and other users in the community (forum search) and will most likely be on the wrong frequency even then… so yes it matters. For gw look for off the shelf products that fully support min 8 channel LoRaWAN (not just LoRa), or concentrator cards that can be used for embedded designs and self builds. Target devices are based on SX130x products not SX12xx.
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Isn’t that the Rolls-Royce solution that requires you to break the Fair Use Policy …
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this a great discussion… giving a lot of insight…
my primary objective is very simple… read the soil moisture from 3 different sensors and collect it as a database at a frequency of every 12 hours and plot a graph so that water conservation can be done and the farm get water throughout the year.
as i am doing all by myself i am bound to make mistakes and hope to learn from it!
also i don’t mind keeping it offline if possible as it is my farm location has no internet connectivity at all neither there is a mobile connectivity as it is deep inside mountain ranges.
Sound like a very simple point to point LoRa system.
yes simple start but plan to extend with other sensors and then zone wise sensors hence i am also looking for scalability to be a part of it from day one.
So with no Internet connectivity how are you planning for the Gateway to forward data to TTN ?
the internet line is being worked upon and should be there sometime soon.
i want to setup the rest in the mean time so when the internet line comes to the farm i will have everything in a working state.
If you want to use TTN you need internet. That means the only way to setup things is at a different location where internet is available. If you want to use a standalone setup you don’t need internet, however that would not use TTN and is out of scope for this forum.
Hello eveyone, Me and my supervisor want to know if something can be done. We want to know if we can simulate the behavior of a gateway and be able to access the gateway protocols and add payloads to the message we send to the TTN
Search the forum. Both questions have been answered multiple times already.
Can You mention me in any of these questions I can’t seem to find them