@mensa I did not see your response to this but the sensor’s antenna and its placement are (at minimum) of equal importance as gateway antenna and placement.
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Yes, the mailbox is metal. It’s the Dragino LDS02 sensor. I think it’s antenna is not the best. Do you have any experience?
Tried what exactly?
I am still waiting for suggestions for a cheap and simple gateway which could do this. I currently only have the TTIG.
I know one posted the chipsets here, but isn’t there any out-of-the-box running gateway for beginners with much better coverage than the TTIG?
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I don’t have a Dragino LDS02 myself and could not find any visual information about its internals.
It’s not as simple as that ‘throwing some better gateway at it’ will solve your problem. Several factors are involved (reread above responses and other information on the forum about antenna’s, gateway coverage and the like to get an impression).
There will be other gateways than TTIG that will provide better coverage but that will mainly be because of better, usually external, antenna. Whether a (gateway with) better gateway antenna will actually solve your problem is unclear and not guaranteed, because as said many factors are involved (of which an essential part on the end device side).
Welcome to the world of radio communication.
To start you can do some simple experiments like hanginging your TTIG outside the window/building and positioning the LDS02 outside the building (in near line of sight) to see if they will communicate in (near) line of sight conditions. From there you can start placing end device and gateway in other locations/positions (only one at a time!). It may help to get some end device with external antenna (with an antenna connector for experimenting where you can try different antennas) e.g. something like TTGO LoRa 32 v2.x or TTGO T-Beam. Maybe you can borrow a gateway from someone to do some experimenting with external antenna and positioning. If there is a Things Network community in your area try to visit it and learn from others.
For your application/situation there will probably not exist a ready solution that will work right out-of-the-box (independant of any environmental conditions).
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You have a gateway and a device - why do you need another gateway to try it out? Literally ten minutes effort. Just do it. There is NO reason not to.
You have no idea what coverage you can get with your TTIG as you haven’t tried it. There are adaptions documented on adding a better / external antenna to the TTIG.
But the short answer is NO, there are no other out-of-the-box gateways for beginners - the TTIG is the closest you get to plug & play - all the rest require you to read the documentation & configure them.
The point with the list of chipsets is that all gateways have silicon from the same manufacturer - some of the chip sets are slightly less power hungry &/or more sensitive - but for most purposes are pretty much the same. The differences are in packaging (the box) and interface (web/console).
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I did of course already try!! But it just does not work. When I go down to the ground floor I can get only connection in line of sight. That’s the reason why I asked here.
I also was walking around with a battery pack with the TTIG, but I was not able to get in connected with that device in that place, so that’s why I am looking for something stronger.
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And the TTIG was connected to TTN how? …were you monitoring that the TTIG itself was online during that time? Connected via Wifi tethering to mobile phone? (Often works for me in right locations for such surve work)
Reality is a small sensor with an inefficient built in ant, mounted inside a metal box, talking up 7-8 floors and even then possibly not normal to the floors but also likely subtending an acute angle through building infrastructure such that the radio path through any floor or walls then appears much thicker than nominal is always going to be a bit of a hope and a prayer unless you get assists by reflections or channels through building features such as stairwells or elevator shafts… you need to try various locations for the GW (as location for the mail box is fixed!) and look to get ant signal for the sensor outside the mail box.
“Stronger” isnt a thing in the LoRaWAN world as devices are constrained to operate within Radio regulatory limits wrt emissions and usually operate at or close to those limits unless using inefficient antennas or device and GW very close to each other with ADR enabled in which case they automagically adapt to the high strength signal and reduce signal strength and minimise on air time to save battery and spectrum utilisation - note they dont adapt the other way and go higher than permitted…
Adding a higher gain ant to GW doesnt help as you then have to reduce the GW TX pwr - a zero sum game - also beam strength gets focussed more towards the horizon…not vertically to a node below or a GW above…you might consider angling the node/GW to help directionality but impact is usually limited…
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There is no “of course” about it - you ask for assistance, we give you potential solutions - then you come back asking more questions when we don’t know if you’ve tried anything - so we have no new information to work on.
As @Jeff-UK has explained, there is no concept of ‘stronger’ - the device may benefit from a better antenna as it is such a tiny thing and you have potential options for either an external antenna on the TTIG so you can position it more easily or using pretty much any other gateway you like, all of which will cost at least 50% to 1000% more than a TTIG.
You may find any of the numerous resources on the internet to learn more about radio propagation gives you some ideas. Or you could try 2.4GHz ISM radios, which if they aren’t LoRaWAN, are off topic. Or just go and run downstairs and check manually.
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And we (the forum users reading along) know that because? Our crystal balls wore out long ago so please mention relevant information, don’t make us guess.
You can try positioning the sensor and the TTIG in different ways to ‘align’ the antenna radiation patterns. Check the forum for pictures of opened up TTIGs to see how the antenna is oriented. For the sensor you can see the antenna orientation when replacing the batteries.
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