To be prepared for the upgrade of the Things Stack to version 3, I build another Semtech Packet Forwarder Gateway for testing and migrating my LoRa nodes. Sadly the version 2 stack nodes will not be supported later on this year (2021). The message on The Things Console is clear about that: “Warning The Things Network is shutting down v2 clusters later this year. Start moving your applications and devices to a v3 cluster!”
Hardware
This time I did not build it with a Raspberry Pi but with an Orange Pi PC Plus because the Orange Pi PC Plus has 8 GB EMCC flash on board that function better as “hard drive” than the SD card.
I used again an iC880A-SPI card as LoRa transceiver. Design a nice 3D printed housing and it worked flawlessly.
Antenna
Now I build a new gateway I could easily upgrade the antenna and his postion for a better LoRa reception. So I bought a UHF 868MHz Outdoor Water and Wind Resistance IP67 High Gain Antenna with a max gain of 8dBi. With a aluminium Antenna Stand it is mounted near the roof top. I could not reach the highest point of my house without risking my life, so for a while I am very happy with this solution.
The result is a smaller box on a shelf with the Gateway an I hope it will work for many years waiting for the next upgrade.
Software
I used mainly the instruction of this site https://github.com/ttn-zh/ic880a-gateway/wiki and mainly changed the server to eu1.cloud.thethings.network. I had to recompile some of the code to make it work on the Orange Pi Armbian OS.