Please return to step 0 where you have a gateway and two or three devices in the same room and you learn LoRaWAN really well before inflicting complications on yourself like trying to debug downlinks on a device 30km away whilst saying things that break the FUP - you know we hate that, well we’re not so keen on downlinks either - search the forum for more info, very particular the why and what happens to a gateway when you do a downlink.
I think you are spinning your wheels at present so I’d suggest you stop for now - get the device in the same room as you to debug things and as you have aspirations for a great TaDa roll out across your village, you really need to know LoRaWAN well before your neighbours start trying to warp time & space with their ideas and you literally break LoRaWAN / TTN in your area.
As a minimum, you need to know: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/ which should get you to a point where you can get the basic certification. Inevitably you will end up wanting or needing to build your own devices, so getting good with Arduino & LMIC-node & an Adafruit Feather M0 with RFM95 would be a good start.