LoRaWAN spotting - add a gateway and they will come

lclora
Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:38:16 +0000

Thanks for the reply. I’ve kept an eye on the live gateway list and so far I’ve seen 56 uplinks from unique devices, these mostly start with 13 so SENET, the majority have frame counters of 13 to 18, and seem to update twice a day, putting them as coming online about a week ago, so these are new. I can only think they are updating water meters street by street, but not see anything near by happening. We do have a new ring road opening soon, so I wondered if it might be related to that and they’ve added sensors all along it, as I’m amazed that water meters in the ground under metal covers would allow me to hear so many as I’m not in a dense housing area, so to hear 56 at the last count they must spread out a long way.

I’m also seeing around 48 devices attempting to join but they don’t seem to ever join anything, I’ve always seen these trickle past in the live gateway view but never counted them up before.

Had a blip of about 20 confirmed uplinks stream past in a matter of seconds, for two addresses starting 00 which seems to be an experimental address, so someone having a play about with something.

Just find it fascinating that it was really quiet here at the start of the year when I added my gateway, and thinking perhaps LoRaWAN had had its day and other tech was in favour, so I’m please to see that isn’t the case, and if I’m helping to provide some coverage, I’m quite happy doing that.

Just an edit, I found a post on the towns Facebook page asking to rent a bit of roof space to install LoRaWAN gateways, linking to here https://www.smartmeters.tech/. I don’t know if it would packet broker elsewhere so I could use it for my own devices and then remove my own gateway? It could be I’m already providing some coverage then, be nice to get paid for it.