Gateway newbie questions (pairing, outdoor antenna, ...)

Gateways
1

Hi, while pretty new to LoraWAN and TTN, I think about starting a gateway in my rural area. I already have some freewifi / Freifunk and embedded and sysop experience, so this doesn’t look to complex to me. But some questions I couldn’t figure out from the docs / posts / … so I need your experience to get some answers:

Do GWs interlink / pair just by radio?

Looking at TTNmapper, it seems that Gateways also form a kind of radio network. But do they also forward messages via their Lora-Interfaces? From my POV, they only collect the nodes messenges, but don’t work together as S2S network?

Outdoor antenna for unlimited location?

I like to mount my gateway at a existing 10m mast on a hill, where my weather station is already powered. But which omni-antenna is useful?(noise vs. sensitivity for a radio novice).
Is a big 60cm single pipe more useful than a 4 pipe star layout?

2

  1. There is no gateway to gateway traffic using radio. (And none using IP either)

  2. Any omnidirectional antenna will work well. Avoid directional antennas. Keep in mind the legal limit for transmissions, using ideal cable (no loss) with 6dB antenna and default settings will push transmissions over the limit. The antenna + cable and connector loss should result in about 2 dB ‘amplification’.

3

If you mount your antenna on a hill and a tower take care of the radiation pattern (elevation). It could happen that you radiate over the nodes. This is the reason why GSM-antennas work with a down-tilt.
Sometimes a 3dBi antenna is better than a 8dBi antenna because of the radiation-pattern.