Hey,
I’m in the market for getting my first gateway.
It seems my 2 best options right now are either the IC880A-SPI or a RAK831 and I’d be using both with a RPi3.
Can anyone give any advice on which may be the better solution, I’m sure both are capable concentrators and I have extensive experience with the MTech Conduits from my day job, but am a little more uninformed when it comes to the more fun DIY side.
Cheers
True, there is room for subjectivity there 
In that case I mean more supported and new user friendly, I guess.
I think they are both good and supported boards.
Also on this forum.
Maybe have a look at the price… ?
Yea, price and ease of purchase is somewhat swaying me towards the Ic880a.
I can get that quicker and from within the EU, simplifying import etc.
The RAK only seems to be available on AliExpress from what I can see and while comparably priced, after import and the possible longer wait if they were equal on all other fronts I’d probably go Ic880a.
That said if the RAK provided some key bonus feature that I’m unaware of then it may well warrant the importing and extra cost/delays etc.
true… and there is a special IMST action at the moment
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/forum/t/the-bargain-basement-part-3/9852/219
For gateways the RPi2 is a better choice. RPi3 has some SPI issues not found on the RPi2 and the RPi2 has plenty cycles to run the software. I’ve revered to RPi2 for my recent gateways.
With regards to iC880a vs RAK831. Both good value for money. RAK offers a complete setup with adapter PCB between the RPi and the concentrator board. For iC880a you need to order an adapter PCB elsewhere (excellent choices available from fellow TTNers, search the forum if you haven’t found them yet). Don’t be tempted to use wires to connect the RPi to a concentrator long term.
Setup for both is super easy when you use resin.io (GitHub - jpmeijers/ttn-resin-gateway-rpi), they use the same code. (Instructions on how to setup can be found at the TTN Conference workshop GitHub - kersing/gateway-workshop: Workshop instructions for the TTN Conference workshop, applicable to both iC880a and RAK831 board, for iC880a you just need to set the correct reset pin depending on the board you use)
The RAK831 is more compact/smaller than the iC880A. For certain applications this could be a deciding factor.
Another option to consider:
Im using RPI zero and ic880a without any issues.
that’s interesting, does the RPI zero has different SPI timings then the RPI3 ?
_I know @Charles build a GW with RPI zero and RAK831, how does it compare to a bigger RPI3 _
You are right, the RPi zero has a different controller that does not experience the issue the RPi3 has. However it does not have wired ethernet which for a gateway is preferable to minimize network delays.
Thanks for all the input guys.
In the end I ordered an IC880a for some of the reasons I mentioned plus the discount that was on after the conference helped.
I ended up getting this adapter board also : https://shop.coredump.ch/product/ic880a-lorawan-gateway-backplane/
I’m definitely going to look into using resin io, currently I have it setup more manually.
I am using an RPi3 for now and so far haven’t experienced any issues, what kind of problems could I expect going forward if I chose to stay with it ? I do have other older RPis around I could swap to if needs be though they are fulfilling other roles in my home at the moment.
I’ve made a blog post of setting up both gateways. It’s currently not a comparison, but I’m working on it at the moment to expand it a bit more.
@oisecnet On your blog post you mention integrating the new Semtech software into the ttn-zh build. Why not move to JPMeijers resin.io build to switch to a packet forwarder with the TTN native protocol build in? (MP Forwarder uses the latest Semtech libraries.)
Good idea to try to integrate the MP Forwarder in the ttn-zh build. I personally dislike resin.io as I usually also have some other stuff running on the gateway it self. (had some bad experiences with resin.io in the past).
I’ll give it a go today on the RAK831 (that means the MP forwarder not resin.io) 
Just updated the RAK831 to use the MP Forwarder and it seems to work just fine
Can you elaborate a bit on that?
Is this related to the BCM2837 chip?
The RPi2 you can buy today (v1.2) have the same chip than the RPi3 so it wouldn’d make any difference…
The MP Forwarder can simple run as Docker container without using resin.io. You need only to change a few lines in the Dockerfile.template from JPMeijers and it works fine. i have running that since a couple of month.
To setup @kersing’s MP Forwarder on a Raspberry Pi without using resion.io you can use the following:
@Charles has updated the setup and documentation in the above github repository.
It is not needed to make below changes anymore, this is now handled via questions in setup automatically.
While this setup is meant for @Charles’s ‘RAK831-Zero’ Raspberry Pi Zero adapter board it can also be used for other (or without) adapter boards. This requires only two changes - described below - to the setup script.
When using a different (or no) adapter board the following changes should be made to the setup.sh script:
GW_RESET_PIN=25GW_RESET_PIN=17setup.sh will update the reset ‘pin’ (gpio) value in /opt/loragw/start.sh where it is named SX1301_RESET_BCM_PIN)Seems charles already done what I was intending to do I’ll just link to his setup
Concerning docker I would not prefer to run that on a PI.