Possible to get Lora signal strength report using LoPy4

[Arnold Quinsey]

I have purchased some Lopy4 devices and have had no luck connecting them to Lora. Is there any test code that will give an output of any lora gateways within range and the relative signal strength?

[rcolistete]

After mastering LoRaWan node configuration to send packets (uplink), yes, it is possible :

• to read LoRa signal report if you configure a downlink (LoRaWan server -> LoRaWan gateway -> LoRaWan node);
• with Pycom MicroPython, use lora.stats(), which returns rssi, snr and sfrx of the last received packet (from a LoRaWan gateway).

[jcaron]

@Arnold-Quinsey contrary to what happens in other networks (cellular, WiFi...), LoRaWAN gateways don’t advertise their presence. They only reply to join requests and to some uplinks.

So there’s no way to scan for gateways, discover gateways in range or anything like that.

Most networks/network servers will enable you to see logs of your join requests (and eventual join responses), though.

The two main reasons for not being able to join are not being in range (line of sight to the gateway is the best situation, anything else is difficult to predict) and having a misconfiguration of channels to use (most common in the US region where networks only listen on a small subset of all possible channels).