RAK7249 vs The Things Outdoor Gateway

they look like ‘marine’ GPS antennas

Interesting…I have an outdoor RAK gateway it came with 2 small 0 dbi antennas but was pretty much useless for real outdoor range…

I noticed in some of the pictures in this thread with the antennas are configured to closely together…from the documentation if one has two antennas they need to be 100 cm apart…

wall_deploy2-two-attennas

This is my soon to be deployed gateway in Washington, DC :), I will be doing a wall mount, not a base station.
my_outdoor

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Has anybody tried to configure LTE? I am trying with a hologram.io sim without success so far

@krital yes I have done LTE on both these two gateways. At first it worked perfectly on both using a custom APN on one of our main mobile networks. A few days ago TTOG stopped connecting and even after a factory reset I can’t get it to connect anymore. The RAK was offline for a couple of weeks and I switched it back on a few days ago. Connected perfectly. The following day I got notification emails that it used more than 512MB of data over night!! So now it is offline too because it ran out of data.

Actually i managed to get it working using hologram. I then used the hologram features to create an ssh tunnel to the box for ssh and another for web interface. I logged in and installed node exporter so i can now get metrics. As i have no clue about this firmware there is little point to experiment with docker/balena but at least i can remotely manage it.

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I am looking to but few outdoor gateways, which of these should I go for based on the experiences.

The only I have is the TTNOG and been testing it for 1 day, seems to work so far but I can’t recommend it until its been tested more…

did you get hologram working on RAK7249 ? and how did you get the SSH working ? I want to manage the gateway through SSH.

@jpmeijers can you share as to how you are remotely managing RAK7249 ?

I am actually still looking for a good way to do this. Remote management is a definite requirement for us as I can not drive up a mountain which is 200km away just to change a config. Normally I use BalenaCloud, but anything similar for the RAK7249 and TTOG would be nice too. @krital’s suggestion to use Hologram seems nice, but I don’t know it at all.

@krital can you please let us know how you were able to use hologram to achieve ssh connection.

Sure, I created a hologram SSH tunnel that forwards SSH , WEB interface, node_exporter to localhost ports… Its all documented in hologram website…

If you cellular provider is not as fancy as hologram, you could also use things like:

https://ngrok.com

https://serveo.net

Hope this helps

@jpmeijers can you share your experience of the two gateways in terms of stability and connection over LTE ? I am looking to buy either of them for my projects.

I’m not ready to install either of these gateways outdoors where they are difficult to reach. I recently discovered why my TTOG’s LTE went offline: it ran out of data because it uses 30MB-60MB per day.
See: Things Outdoor Gateway - TTOG part 1
And: Gateway data usage

The RAK7249 also ran out of data and the pictures looks even worse:

Description Session Start Session End Usage
Afrihost APN Usage 2019-06-10 2019-06-10 00:00:00 2019-06-10 23:59:59 607.14KB
Afrihost APN Usage 2019-06-11 2019-06-11 00:00:00 2019-06-11 23:59:59 1.28GB
Afrihost APN Usage 2019-06-12 2019-06-12 00:00:00 2019-06-12 23:59:59 2.01GB

Taking into consideration that previous tests indicated about 3.5MB of data usage per day for a normal UDP based gateway these numbers are way out. I need to get this fixed as running a gateway at this data usage will become expensive.

Our TTOG is going up early next week (mid-wales, UK). We are using a Taoglas Barracuda antenna, mounted 3m away from the unit to gain extra elevation. 400 series N Plug to N Plug.

Might sound a silly question - is there any issue with mounting the gateway upside down? So the GPS antenna faces skywards?

Which gateway are you talking about? Perhaps ask in a gateway specific topic?

I’ve removed the post. We had a small issue with the Gain setting on the TTOG flagging an error in the logs. All resolved.

Hi, i have 2 TTOG gw, and I configurated in LTE mode. The gateway work fine, because when i go to conect by ethernet again, i cant acces to gateway?

Any idea to restar to default? (There aren’t any bottoms ¿?)

Thanks in advance

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