Australia/New Zealand - simplier Nodes in Arduino

Countries
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There are now increasing numbers of TTN Gateways across Australia and New Zealand which is great to see. However I note that the traffic across my own gateway is very small. I think this is partly due to the difficulty in setting up a basic, simple node to run on AU915 frequencies (with LoRaWAN OTAA) using the Arduino environment; which is still the dominant player in maker projects/schools/clubs.

Has anyone seen/developed a more elegant solution than taking the LMIC library US frequencies and adjusting them manually? This seems to have been the favoured approach in the past.
Using the Global.json file, used for the gateways to set their frequencies, would seem to be the best approach but I am not sure how to integrate json files into arduino sketches.
With Pycom’s new fork of Micropython, their Lora library makes this effortless, however I am struggling to implement anything simple using Arduino.

I would also appreciate those in Australia/NZ views on the high levels of enthusiasm vs low numbers of installed nodes. It strikes me that our countries are well suited to this technology, so i imagine there are other barriers to entry.

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Hi Phil,

Interesting thoughts.
That is exactly why I originally started out using the AS923 scheme when I first set up my gateway.
I have now switched over to AU915 to maintain compatibility with the general TTN arrangements for Australia.

Yes, traffic is basically non existent through my gateway. Which is good for my development testing as I am unlikely to upset anyone if I get something wrong with bandwidth usage in the short term.

You can count the number of active TTN gateways around Melbourne on one hand. There are probably a few more private ones + those that are not on TTN.

I can only guess that the experience with setting up a gateway/node is just too complex at present. I also think that there is a general lack of commercial interest. Local competition from Sigfox and NB-IOT is strong.

I think for Australia we need a simpler plug and play solution if we are to attract more users.

For me, I intend to keep a rather agnostic view on network usage. There are now a number of node solutions emerging that offer a large degree of network independence. E.g. FiPy.

Cheers
Peter.