@Andreas has started to collect different LoRaWAN Gateway solutions
I’d like to ask first about the requirements we have. Especially in the
Rural Area with Less Infrastructure
On the countryside, where the most bee hives live today, we have
- no power plugs and
- no WiFi or
- not a second or third relay / gateway to forward data to
That means a gateway has to be
- power saving, e.g. with a sleeping mode but
- with the opportunity to get waked up by an incoming data package
- in the best case the option to send data via GSM/GPRS to the internet
This are the drawbacks, but we have some advantages also:
Well-known Nodes
A full qualified (TTN-)gateway for example has to serve different spreading factors and different frequencies and has to manage some operations in parallel. Our gateway does not necessarily have to fulfill all these requirements.
We have dedicated nodes with known spreading factors and known or fixed frequencies. This makes our setup not so universal and perhaps not so robust but it is less expensive doable. So a single channel TTN gateway would also fit our needs.
Gateway to Gateway or to WiFi or to GSM/GPRS?
Most available LoRaWAN gateways forward the packages via WiFi to the target address. But we need a solution that sends data via GSM/GPRS (or NB IoT) to the internet.
Universal Solution – For Now
My wish list for today would be
- solar powered
- great sleep mode with the option to wake up the MC with an incoming package via IRQ (I think the RFMxx modules can do this)
- forwarding data via GSM/GPRS
I don’t know if all listed spec items will fit, but the only board for this requirements approximately I know is the GPy by PyCom. So I would be happy to do some more research with this use case in mind.