Packet loss of LoRa-E5 with factory firmware

Products & Technology LoRa
#1

I wonder what could be causing loss of packets. I have repeated this with multiple boards and multiple gateways, always the same result.

I have an E5 mini board and an RG186 gateway. I use EU868. Sending packets from the E5 the gateway will pick up about 1/10 of the packets sent. Very randomly receiving sometimes two or three (rarely) packets in row but very often loosing between 3-10 packets in between each received/decoded packet.

I set the device up with the following sequence:

AT+FDEFAULT=Seeed
AT+UART=TIMEOUT,0
AT+LOG=DEBUG
AT+LW=VER, V103
AT+DR=EU868
AT+CH=3,867.1,0,5
AT+CH=4,867.3,0,5
AT+CH=5,867.5,0,5
AT+CH=6,867.7,0,5
AT+CH=7,867.9,0,5
AT+LW=DC,OFF
AT+LW=JDC,OFF
AT+ADR=OFF
AT+KEY=NWKSKEY,79252593F1562F92F17D561A1CDD154E
AT+KEY=APPSKEY,6AE7293B7D229B4D5A312F78AC75E81E
AT+ID=DevAddr,01003111
AT+ID=DevEUI,DC221144335566EE
AT+ID=AppEUI,7F12042002CF840A
AT+KEY=APPKEY,1778899AABBCCDD432A112233445566A
AT+MODE=LWABP
AT+LW=NET,OFF
AT+REPT=1
AT+CLASS=A
AT+POWER=14
AT+DR=DR5
AT+PORT=8

then repeatedly sending the following message:

AT+MSGHEX=41534E49

and the gateway will pick up packets very randomly. I’ve tested this with distance 1 meter up to 10 meters between gateway and E5.

Any help, hints or comments are very appreciated.

#2

Check logs of gateway to know more precisely what’s happening ! What speed are you sending messages ? as Lora has some duty cycles to respect ! How is used the gw ? connected at TTN ? or a private Lorawan server ?

#3

Tried sf7 (dr5) and sf12 (dr0). No difference. Respecting duty cycles. No difference. Private server. Tried two types. Same results. Logs of gateways simply show no traces of lost packets. Tried also with tektelica kona enterprise gateway. Not yet put spectrum analyzer on tx antenna to make sure something resembling proper signal is xmitted since I do not have one at my disposal currently. Limited tx to channels 0-2. Same results. Gateway is in a very quiet zone. Not overloaded at all.

#4

my 2 cents would be using a real LoRaWAN tester (like wio field tester based on LoRa-E5 that rocks) or another node to see the issue, it can be the node, the gw, the NS, the config on each side …
first I would also try joining OTAA not ABP and would enable ADR.

Also check your antenna

I had no such issue with LoRaE5

1 Like
#5

I can confirm that your hints did the trick. This was in fact a misconfiguration. I’ve got it to work reliably now with both OTAA and ABP. I believe the most important thing was to not use 1.0.3 but rather 1.0.2 with 102B parameter for the E5. Plus, I turned on ADR but it does actually work ok without it as well.