My gateway is running for a few month now, a PG-1302 RPI hat on top of a RPI Zero 2w running the dragino RPI image. I tried to install the FWD software on a bare metal RPI but I couldn’t get it compiled, but maybe that’s something for another story.
Like I said, my gateway is running fine. I didn’t get any beams or heatmap spots but I received many messages form nearby lora devices.
I had a Heltec wireless tracker 1.1 laying around for a few months too but I couldn’t get it to work in arduino. Untill a few days ago.
I made code that uploads GPS through lora. So finally I got some beams from my own gateway. Yay!
Now I want to see the range of my gateway of course so I took the wireless tracker for a ride on my bike.
Very nice, I got more beams, and to my suprise I saw that the signal was also picked up by three other gateways >15km away!
Very nice to see such good coverage in my area.
But, it makes it hard for me to get a good range test for my gateway.
So how can I force my gateway to pick up the signal from my own wireless tracker and prevent it to be picked up by other gateways?
I guess devEui and appKey is not enough and I should use some encryption?
You can’t. However the good news is that you don’t need to. The uplink data forwarded by TTN will contain the data of all gateways that received the packet. So if a packet is received by three gateways it will be forwarded to TTNmapper (or any other application) with an array of gateways and the signal strength and quality information for each of those gateways.
TTNmapper will show that measurement with a line to each of the gateways. Or you could filter for just your gateways and see the measurements pop up.
Keep in mind your gateway might not receive an uplink even if another gateway 15km away does. It all depends on RF propagation to the gateways and especially in urban environments that is totally unpredictable. Building shield quite a lot of RF signal so a row of houses between you and the gateways may cause the uplinks not to be received.