Hi
Is it still possible to set up V3 board as a single channel gateway and send data received from node to TTN servers. Base on my Google research, that was possible, but now I found on Reddit that it’s not possible with newest TTNv3 version and I need to buy full gateway.
If it’s possible, maybe someone have some example, because I can’t find anything (best for V3).
A LoRaWAN gateway has a minimum of 8 receive paths listening across 8 frequencies (channel) for a range of spreading factors, a combination of 48. A single channel packet forwarder can listen to a single frequency and mostly only one SF and only process one uplink at a time, so any other devices you own won’t be heard whilst that’s happening. And anyone else on TTN with a device in range can end up with incorrect settings because the LNS & the device doesn’t know it’s being heard via a SCPF.
If you have an in-depth understanding of the LoRaWAN stack on your device so you can make the necessary modifications and you don’t care about the effective denial of service you will impose on the other community users, then yes, it is possible.
Consider that many TTN community users are doing relatively important stuff with devices - like flood warnings. And the only way you find out how many other users are actually around you is to own a gateway so you can see what traffic is being heard - so it’s not a safe assumption that you are the only local user - and the terrain may allow the Long Range element of LoRa to impact devices 10 or 20km away.
You could run it on your own open source Things Stack so that it doesn’t impact TTN. But you still have to alter the stack to suit.
It is far simpler to use LoRa point to point that do all the above.
A TTIG is about 3 times the price of a LoRa32 v3 so might be considered excellent value for money given in acts as if you had 8 plus the power saving of device batteries that comes from ADR via managing the SFs.
The ESP32 RTC allows you to do point to point and have your gateway / master node send the time so that devices uplink to a schedule so they don’t clash. Simple maths allows you to work out how many devices you can support like this - even if you allow 1 uplink per minute, you’ve got 3600 slots per hour!