Get the components

The first step will be getting all the necessary hardware to build the gateway. Within this chapter we get an idea of the needed parts.

The biggest doubts came up when choosing the right antenna. For the first setup, we have chosen 3,5dBi antenna provided by Farnell. In a later step, we will introduce another installation with the outdoor antenna.

For the RPi to iC880a interface, we have choose to jumper wires to keep the cost of the gateway as low as possible. However, the post strongly recommends using backplane boards to avoid interference.

We have also bought a casing and a box to keep all the hardware inside and prevent outside agents disturb our gateway work.

Put the hardware together

From the third chapter of the previously mentioned post, pay attention on the table that describes the different connections between the iC880a board and the Raspberry Pi. This connections should be the first ones carrying out. 

In case you want to mount the boards on top of the mounting plate, we need to drill holes into the boards to later be able to attach it. In our case, we have avoid making this holes and used this double sided tape to stick the boards in the mounting plate.

Afterwards, we are ready to connect the pigtail for antenna and the actual antenna. Make sure we choose the right connection for the pigtail!

Configure the software

In this chapter you can find the steps to convert the already setup hardware into a real working TTN gateway! For that, the best option is to follow the instructions on this chapter of the post.

Firstly we will need to download the operating system for our Raspberry Pi and save it into the SD card. In this link you can find the instruction for the installation.

Afterwards we will need to start the communication with the Raspberry Pi using SSH. In case of needing additional software for sending SSH commands, for Windows, you can download Putty software from here. For Linux computer or Mac you can simply use the terminal.

After all SSH commands are carried out, your TTN gateway should be up and running already!

Register gateway in TTN platform

In order to keep track of the gateway status, we need to register our gateway in The Things Network platform. For that, we will need to create an account and then, from this page, link the gateway to the already created account. The following post explains in detail every step in the registration.

Once the gateway has been linked with an account in TTN, we will be able to see the status of it in the following webpage. 

Update gateway status in ttnmapper app

In order to update the status of your just built up gateway inside the ttnmapper application, you will need to carry out some experimental testing of your gateway coverage.

From ttnmapper platform, we can monitor the actual status and coverage of different gateway inside The Thigs Network.

In the following story, we can find the steps to for updating the status of our gateway.

After our experiment, i got the following picture of the coverage provided by our recently installed gateway.

Converting it into an outdoor gateway

So finally we were able to complete the whole installation and connect our gateway to the outdoor antenna. As we are keeping the gateway indoors and the antenna outdoors, we need to use a 5 meters long coaxial cable.

Here are some pictures of the final installation

After the installation, we connect our LoRa end device and mapped our new antennas coverage. Here is a picture of the realized experiment. We can see that we are getting better coverage with the installed outdoor antenna.