Laird RG191 LoRa Basic Station

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Hello,

I have a set of LoRaWAN devices on The Things Stack Community (TTN v3). Since migrating to V3, my devices have been operating in the sense that uplink data are forwarded and processed. However, I frequently notice the payloads are either not sent or not collected at consistent time intervals, e.g. devices are set to every 15 min but sometimes I don’t see anything for 30 min, an hour or a few hours.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s because my Laird gateway is still using Semtech UDP forwarder. I know the UDP forwarder is not recommended but my gateway doesn’t connect via LoRa Basic Station. I’ve tried connecting with CUPS and LNS.

The gateway firmware version is 93.8.5.21. I can see there’s a firmware update but the update has been unsuccessful on all attempts. I also use AS923 which doesn’t seem to be having issues.

Any recommendations on how I can troubleshoot this? Thanks.

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Hi Emily,

Welcome to the forum!!

I’m still definitely in the learning phase of LoRaWAN but thought I might be able to chime in.

In Console > Gateways are you able to see when information arrives like in the node?

In the troubleshooting section over on TTN Alliances getting started they suggest that the Semtech UDP forwarder might not be the greatest in terms of reliablilty.
For others that might meet this post heres a link to updating the Laird RG1xx gateways: Connect Laird Sentrius™ RG1xx with LoRa Basics™ Station | The Things Stack for LoRaWAN

PS: I came across this topic from the local Newcastle TTN group and they suggest switching to AU915 for longer term reliability.

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Hi Liam,

Yes, seems like troubleshooting errors and issues is an effective way to learn!
I can see information such as the gateway receiving the uplink message, sending downlink message and its status.

Thanks for the links. I’ve looked through them previously and made sure I followed the procedure to set up CUPS but haven’t been successful.

Thanks for the tip too. Another TTN group use AS923 for their gateway and so I thought it’d be best to maintain consistency over two locations. But wouldn’t hurt for me to give it a go too.

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Yep, TTN is essentially dropping support for AS923. It’s all AU915 now.

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Ok, good to know. Do you guys reckon that’ll solve part of the issue with the inconsistent packets?

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Hey Emily,

Possibly, I beleive that the gateway sends that packets to the AS-handler then back, but that shouldnt take half an hour, if the packets are coming through live from the gateway(in the console screen) then it might be the firmware?

It might be worth making a post over on the TTN forum! The Things Network

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@Emily167920 Laird are very active with support as well, it’s worth finding out why the update is failing. Scroll to the bottom, click Open a Support Ticket on this page. If they do assist with a solution, it would be great to hear back on the forum.

We don’t have a lot of technical info to work with for the symptoms described, though these two concerns also come to mind:

  • Nodes may have low signal strength, could confirm by checking the RSSI for successful packets on TTN debug console
  • If using AS923, perhaps there is a mismatch with the selection of AS1 and AS2 during setup; there are some overlaps for frequencies, though packet loss will occur during each set of 8 frequency rotations because of differences between them.
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