Using high-gain YAGI (11-23dBi) antennas for LoRa gateway (DON’T!)

[arjanvanb (Arjan)]

@johncassidy

Don’t do what Arjan?

Please don’t use high-gain antennas on gateways connected to TTN. Because of:

@LoRaTracker

The gain antenna would allow the Gateway to receive signals from nodes that are further away. However the use of the gain antenna means you need to reduce the Gateway transmit power to stay legal.

So now the remote nodes wont be able to receive messages from the Gateway

Of course, the following is clear and sounds harmless:

@johncassidy

What I suggest merely focus EM at patches of sea, land and sky where there is no LoRaWAN coverage.

I appreciate that your nice use case does not seem to hurt TTN, today. And I assume offshore wind turbines, oil rigs and container ships would never want to rely on the TTN Community network either. But can we really think of all future use cases? And how would I test such antenna setup; would it still point towards the sea while I’m doing my development? But worst of all: the next person will also think their use case is special and warrants some non-standard setup connected to TTN (or justifies abusing the shared radio spectrum), unknowingly hurting others.

@johncassidy

I could go on and share experiences of how this technology really can save and enrich lives.

Why not start your own network, using LoRaWAN or some bespoke LoRa-protocol, for use cases that would need a non-standard LoRaWAN gateway setup?

@johncassidy

How the community decides to use its own gateways whilst obviously complying with local regulations and TTN guidelines is down to them is it not? It’s all LoRaWAN btw.

I don’t think we need guidelines for everything. For example, should TTN have a guideline saying that a gateway is not allowed to ignore downlinks for an unknown DevAddr? Or that gateways should be active 24/7 during normal operations? While such guidelines are not in place, I would not expect anyone to configure such downlink filter or opening hours.

@johncassidy

In terms of HAB, I was referring to the TTN world record attempt recently

I don’t know if the sending node was somehow not LoRaWAN compliant, hence might have affected other devices. (Which indeed would be bad.) But surely no gateways were adjusted for that experiment?