Hello Jeff-UK,
thanks for your comments. No, there really wasn’t a thunderstorm during those hours when the LoRa connection failed.
The following points contradict the assumption that a lightning strike or a spike on the power line could have been the cause of the failure:
all LoRa sensors are battery-powered and are not connected to the power grid.
the LoRa gateway is connected to the power supply, but it was the only device that was connected to the power grid and failed at that time. All other devices (router, server, etc.) did not show any errors.
LoRaWAN gateways have very sensitive receive circuits that fail easily because of lightning. Nothing else needs to be damaged, the large RF spikes caused by thunderstorms can even damage the receivers when located indoors. That’s the disadvantage of sensitive long range equipment.
As Jac says - devices/gw’s do not have to be outside or mains connected to be affected. Though those with longer ant feeds or outside ant more likely to suffer.
Quite often the high RF burst doesnt kill outright but may induce a weakness that fails hard over time or more often I (and colleagues/collaborators/other users) have found that a reasonably close strike may induce a degree of deafness - with RX sensitivity impaired and falling anywhere from 20-80db down (a look at historic records often shows point where it dropped), I know of one instance where an initial strike took a GW down approx 30-40db then another a few weeks later (before unit could be swapped out) took it out altogether!
Gateways have three highly specialised chips on them that can detect & decode across 8 channels & 6 spreading factors and manage to receive 8 signals at the same time.
These chips need to be co-ordinated and the messages extracted from them by a microcontroller that can also provide some form of comms over UDP as a minimum.
This hardware is, in 99.999% of circumstances, just going to keep on trucking for years, so has to be carefully designed & put together. But then the chipset is sufficiently non-trivial that you have to carefully design it in the first place. This means experienced engineers, not Arduino jocks.
Then there’s the case, antenna, connectors, PSU, box, manual, firmware updates etc etc.
So frankly, $/£/€90 for a TTIG is pretty much a bargain - given that it comes through distribution. If you want to go DIY then there are various options to pair up a concentrator card with an MCU for $/£/€20 all in. Home internet WiFi routers range in price from $/£/€30 to big bucks. You even have to pay for a TP-Link router so that it can join all their brethren on Botnet-7777, a price you don’t have to pay for a LoRaWAN gateway. Heck, there are mechanical bread toasters on Amazon that are in the same sort of price range.
