LoRaWAN spotting - add a gateway and they will come

lclora
Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:45:04 +0000

I added my own gateway in a town in the UK of about 25,000 people, mainly as a learning exercise and also to use a few devices myself, and with no known public gateways.

I paid attention to the live gateway logs and no traffic apart from my own few devices, and then I would see the occasional join request from what appear to be smart water meters (a Google on the Join EUI 0007813700000001 found it was for a common brand of water meter) with those join requests going unanswered.

About 6 weeks ago I noticed by chance in the live log an uplink with the device address starting 13, on checking this appears to be for the SENET network. Am I correct in thinking that these uplinks are then passed to SENET? It only seemed to be that one node for a while, then in the last couple of weeks the list has grown quite a bit. From watching the live gateway log I’ve seen 20 unique uplinks from devices starting with this address. The uplink counter for most are 14 - 16, some are much less, showing these are indeed new devices.

I do know the local water authority is moving to smart meters for leakage detection and better billing, and this is via a partnership with Netmore that I believe has bought SENET. Maybe they are just getting around to upgrading meters in the area? I would assume Netmore/SENET will have installed their own private gateways, or in the process of doing so, and I’m either picking up the packets as well, or they haven’t got very good coverage yet. Given most of the devices are using SF12, with a few using SF11, if they have their own gateways they aren’t giving good coverage to some of the nodes, hence they are shouting as loud as they can.

I also see join requests from two nodes using a developer Join UI 90DFFB0000000000 that goes unanswered, and I wonder what these nodes are and who has abandoned them.

Just found it interesting how the airwaves were filling up.