Newbie trying to create a test system

First I would do a study of the area to be covered, if I shuffle through the post seems like some private land or something.

This you could be done by using Google earth, you can download the pro versions for free.

Draw a path from where you intend to place the gateway to the outer side of the intended area covered.

Then you right click on the path and select path profile. From this you will see the terrain profile. If there are a lot of hills in-between the two points you need to look very carefully, try to imaging a straight line between the two points. If the line goes through a hill, your uplink will be most probably not work. So you are all ways trying to accomplish a LOS ( Line of Sight). Remember if you have trees on the path they absorb RF, affect worst if they are wet or full of snow.

So the trick is always to try and locate your gateway on the highest hill in the area ( this holds true until you are working in high density areas, not something to be considered at this time). As this will give you the best coverage.

If you build your own nodes you will discover there are a lot of data in the GPS libraries, position, speed and direction are some of the fields in most of the libraries. There are also some excellent off the shelf nodes, so look around they are their.

Connectors play a big roll here, each have a fe db loss each. So keep them to a minimum.

TTN are by far the easiest if you start. A few things less to configure when you start. Only thing is to keep FUP in mind, max 30sec uplink time per day. So take all your uplink time an air, add them up, not aloud to exceed 30sec. And you are only allowed at max 10 downlink, but this you want to keep to as low as you can. Preferably 0 per day.

Hope you have success in you project