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Comment by superbaconman | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know where do I find a cheap lora gateway that I can use without a service like the things network?

Just a LoRa gateway without the WAN stack? There are usb serial devices for 20-30 pounds, you can use a raspberry pi with them for a cheap gateway. We’ve used some for development and testing. https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/b-l072z-lrwan1.html

There’s a few layers to this. You’re completely correct that you can use those boards for LoRa without LoRaWAN. I think what OP is looking for, though, is cheap LoRaWAN gateways that aren’t tied to The Things Network. Can’t use the SX1276 for that, since it can only time one receive frequency at a time.

There’s cheap gateways available that are hard-coded to talk to TTN, and there’s expensive gateways available that let you run a private WAN. There just doesn’t seem to be cheap gateways available to run a private WAN.

Would these work? They look like OpenWRT LoRaWAN gateways.

https://aliexpress.com/item/4000156211665.html

https://aliexpress.com/item/4001155475503.html

both <200€ raspberry pi solutions and the ~160€ Mikrotik one are not bound to TTN. What's substantially cheaper and TTN-only?

$85 (~70€) will buy https://www.adafruit.com/product/4345 which is TTN-only.

I have read rumors of alternate firmware to allow that hardware to work outside TTN but haven’t chased it down myself, so mine is running as a TTN node right now.

You’re looking at around $150 for an 8-channel base node. The single channel at a time nodes (like the SX1276 in the one you linked) “work” but with significant limitations compared to the $150-500 8-channel gateways.

Adafruit has a ton of stuff. I've been buying various boards from them and they even have "bonnets" for RaspberryPi that are plug and play with python example code.

https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=lora

Those are all single-channel, gateways are traditionally multichannel.

I'm not sure on the price, or whether it can be run without the Things Network, as I haven't been able to buy one yet, but perhaps take a look at the Alfa Tube ELoRaWANGW, which can run OpenWRT.

Commenting just to say I’m working on it. Unfortunately nothing publicly available yet.

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