Review Laird Sentrius LoRaWan Gateway

After having tested different LoRaWan gateway like Kerlink iFemToCell, TheThingsGateway and Kerlink Wirnet, in the past two years, I was looking for a new low cost indoor gateway for deploying TheThingsNetwork (the global crowd-sourced LoRaWan network) in my city.

Gateway are not all easy to shop, Kerlink at first. As one of my iFemToCell has burned into the hell this summer with no reason after only 3 months powered-on I was not looking for the same. TheThingsGateway has different semiconductor provider reseller but myne suffer of certain instabilities actually and I need to reboot on regular basis. So that’s the reason of this new try.

Let’s see how to setup on TTN.

Unpacking

The gateway can be found on mouser for a price under 200€ making it one of the less expensive. You can get better with the DiY approach when you recycle some RPI but in my point of view, to make a stable and stress-less public network it’s better to rely on packaged hardware you can deploy and change in a minute.

The gateway is provided with all the needed elements: antennas, network cable, power supply. The power supply block as the blue plastic box seems to directly been shipped from the 80’s. Regarding the price… nothing bad to say.

The gateway supports 5G Wifi networks, this is the only one I’ve been tested. I won’t say it is needed but in my own case it was important because I have some problem with my WiFi replicator on 2.4GHz…forget that it’s only due to my WiFi network settings. But I’m happy to have this option.

The 868 antenna is a simple 1/4 wave as on most of the indoor gateway. You don’t really know if it is centered on 868 or 915Mhz. For an indoor only purpose it will be OK. For a larger use you will have to change it.

Powering

The powering cable is really small and that’s a problem to select the right place to install it. Radio is the main element to consider for gateways here you need to be really near a power source.

There is no documentation coming with the gateway. Just a link on the website. Even if the documentation is indicating the Gateway is on 192.168.1.1, for real the gateway is using DHCP. You need to pay attention: the Gateway console is on HTTPS (with a poor self-signed certificate) with no redirect from HTTP.

The login is sentrius and password RG1xx so you will change this asap. The application is proposing you to do it with popup, that is a good point. But it force you to use a certain format of password… something I hate, particularly when the same guy have chosen to use the same really really bad short password for all its gateway ! man, if you are not educated yourself, please don’t try to educate others !

You can configure a WiFi (also in 5G ;)) and set the IP as static, reboot… When you change the IP for another one the refresh & cache starts to be a mess… You will see.

Setup with TTN

That a really nice point, when setting LoRaWan network, you can directly set TheThingsNetwork in the UI !

Create a new gateway in TTN console to create a GatewayID and a GatewayKey. Then in the admin panel, LoRa >> Forwarder you can put these information.

That’s it the gateway is running on TTN network. Simple isn’t it ?!?

Performance

Regarding my actual test there is no big difference on Laird than on other gateways I have. The gateway looks stable. Nice product.

There are some negative point discovered all along the usage:

  • The firmware update updates the firmware even with the same version and it destroy all the settings…  So you have to loose your config to know if a new firmware is available. It also clear the password to factory one.
  • The configuration export is not complete.
  • The web server seems to crash after a long time even if the gateway works well I had to reboot to get access back.

And the positive points

  • Gateway is really stable for getting LoRaWan packets. I did not had to reboot it or anything in the last months.

5 thoughts on “Review Laird Sentrius LoRaWan Gateway

  1. Hi,
    Thank you for all your posts! Theyvare very very interesting!
    According to your tests, what is the range of this gateway. Is the hardware good enough to cover a few houses around yours, the neighborhood, the city,…?
    Thanks a lot!

    • The coverage really depends on you antenna location, indoor will cover few houses around, outdoor can cover a whole city if you are in a elevated location or really less if you are lost around mountains of bigger building.

  2. Hi,
    Great write up. Can you please clarify couple of things

    1. What is the range of frequency supported by the 868MHz model ?

    2. Is it strictly for European band ? Can I set the radios to Indian band which is 865-867 MHz ?

    2. Does it restrict the duty cycle? Can I run at 100% duty cycle since we have no restriction in India ?

    Thanks
    Rajib

    • 1 and 2, You should take a look to Laird website. I do not have the answer in mind.
      3 It is supposed to respect it. Concerning India, by the way, you should never use 100% of the bandwidth just because the principle is to share the frequency. Even if there is no regulation in this. If everyone is trying to use 100% you are sure no-one will communicate. Another reason is LoRaWan is Low power communication, if you communicate at 100% you need to have a power source… so you can use another technology like 3G. So basically this question is absurd.

  3. Pingback: MikroTik LoRa8 Gateway - disk91.com - technology blogdisk91.com – technology blog

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.