OK, this is somewhat of a moan, and some may judge it off-topic, but I’m trying to understand what’s happening to our (my) disappearing TTN infrastructure.
I’ve been hosting a couple of TTN gateways in the Sheffield, UK area since around 2017. We used to have many other university-deployed gateways, but these now seem to have vanished, effectively wiping out an entire TTN setup—unless I’m missing something. It baffles me how those with the funding show such a lack of foresight and awareness. Meanwhile, in contrast, Leeds has deployed a large-scale TTN solution covering the city in the last two years.
Anyway, here’s my issue: after losing my gateways for a couple of days due to technical issues, I brought everything back online. Somehow, my main outdoor gateway is now processing over 4,000 uplinks in a 24-hour period (plus 10% ack’d)—yet none of these are my devices. Not one.
It’s not possible that these devices rely solely on my gateway to process their uplinks, so what other LoRaWAN network is handling their traffic? And just as importantly, why is this not a two-way street—why can’t my devices use their gateways in the same way?
I suspect, from what I’ve seen both here 'Op North and else where, that university lecturers would setup a gateway or two but when they moved on, the gateways just fade away. LW is too intense for the general BSc/MSc curriculum so they aren’t a must have.
What changed with the setup - new antenna?
Anyhoo, I’m sure you are aware that it will send the messages it hears as it won’t know who they are for. And equally, you can send uplinks which their secretly deployed hidden gateways may hear but if they aren’t on TTN, you will never know.
I guess our challenge is to find compelling use cases that save money for a local authority so they deploy gateways and they encourage their communities to deploy sensors for additional benefits.
I get that, something seems to have happened at the end of January 2025 and the dropping of legacy V2 gateways support, from what I can tell a lot of legacy gateways vanished, this has sort of compounded the issue
I have done some digging on gateway history locally based on a GPS tracker node I carry around in my truck, whilst TTN support locally was always weak the last of the legacy V2 gateways seem to have all dropped off the planet - did I miss an announcement? feel a fool right now as V2 gateways on TTN mapper have all gone bye bye.
As re my setup, I have an older rak831 still running on Pi3 with an external antenna at good height, its updated and on Balena and been stable for years. Anyway it just died on me, I found some time to dig deep and check, reset and resit boards etc - took me days and I kept getting SPI error, normally its pin settings but still could not get it to work. In the end I changed GW_GPS to true and it sprung back to life - bizarre (it does have a gps device on the serial port but its not being picked up plus there is no pps signal either so its all pointless). Been rock solid since, all very odd.
I wish I knew the Leeds story, not seen any publications.
