I am using a TTN Indoor Gateway and LoStick from Ronoth, which has a RN2483 module on it.
I wanted to try if DR6 can be used as well and configured the channel on the stick like mentioned here:
Unfortunately my device is only using the channel if I force it to do. Although I am using ADR, the gateway does not assign DR6.
Anyways, I was doing some research on this topic.
I read some papers and usually no one uses DR 6. Why is that? Is it because of the Specification (CFList) not supporting it?
Like all node interactions, ADR is performed by the network server, not the gateway, and takes into account all gateways that have picked up the node, not just one, ideally not just in the instant but in recent history.
LoRaWAN gateways don’t really have any “smarts” or algorithms; all they do is move packets between LoRa air modulation and IP network backhaul. They’re basically telepresence robots that let the network server be at the location every gateway antenna in the system.
And yes, these are single channel data rates, because a LoRaWAN card only has one sub-IF demodulator capable of each, unlike the two sets of four which do multi-SF at the slower rates.
As for why TTN doesn’t seem to be willing to command them, that should be its own issue. I thought I’d heard of it before but am not finding it. One thought is that doing so might expose a lot of otherwise overlooked issues in parts of people’s systems not frequently exercised, leading to breakage right when things started working wonderfully enough for one of these to be commanded. It’s kind of hard to support it from some people and not everyone - if DR6 is commanded, there isn’t a great way to say “no thanks, I’m good with DR5”. I guess it could be a check box in a device page, but that gets complicated and introduces special casing in a place it may not be, eg I don’t know if the ADR code necessarily “knows” much about the node.