You absolutely need to have an antenna on each of the boards in order to have them unction properly. Even a small and short wire will do. See the attached photo for details:
I am part of the problem: I wanted the ProRF board to talk to the LoRa Gateway but the example sketch for the ProRF client is not compatible with the gateway. (LoRa WAN is very different from point-2-point comms and I missed that important point.) The ProRF (1st set of) examples are intended for point-2-point comms, and not point-2-WAN_gateway comms.
A very knowledgeable EE friend of mine says that for a testing when the boards are a few cm’s apart, an ant. is not necessary. I have ant.'s for each board but they will be used when we test the prototype of what the board is attached to. Those connectors don’t survive many connects/re-connects so we haven’t attached them.
Finally:
I don’t really need WAN Gateway software to run on the Gateway board. What I’d really like is point-2-point comms between the ProRF board and the Gateway board, and if possible, just have the Gateway board act as a network server that a client can connect to on a specific port and get the data coming over the radio in a stream. This last feature is just a little easier that dealing with the serial port on my laptop to get the data.
So, the ProRF is connected to a sensor board and it sends the data to another LoRa board – in my case the Gateway board – and the Gateway board makes it available to whomever is connected to it via the WiFI or the Serial port.
The ProRF comes with a client/server example. What I need is the server sketch to work on the Gateway board.
While your very knowledgeable EE friend may be correct that an antenna may not be needed to get a detectable signal from one board to another at short range, this is not why you NEED to use one.
Any transmitter, small or large, is vulnerable to energy reflected back from a mismatched output. When the device attempts to transmit, an output pin that does not dissipate the energy efficiently merely reflects it back into the driver, easily weakening or destroying the device. The output stage (transistor) may fail sooner, or may fail later for no apparent reason.
My friend mentioned this too when we found that the boards could only talk to each other across a very small distance which was impractical to maintain while working. We have since attache full size ant.'s and mounted in makeshift enclosures while the work continues.
I just purchased 2 SparkFun LoRa Gateway - 1-Channel (ESP32). Installed the LoRa Gateway 1-Channel Board Definition and loaded the “blink” test…It is working fine.
Done the editing as said in the ”Configure the Gateway Sketch” part of the hookup guide….Lorded the required libraries ,but following error comes up when trying to compile…
NOT ABLE TO POST THE SCREEN SHOT! Images are not accepted here!
Error shown by Arduino IDE as follows: Yes it is at _lroFiles tab and int initConfig(struct espGwayConfig *c) function call area!
no return statement in function returning non-void [-Werror=return-type]
