LoRa Basics Station with USB (MTAC-LORA-1.0) Lora card

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  • January 4, 2021 at 2:34 am #31470
    Heath Raftery
    Participant

    Seems like a straight-forward issue, but I’ve spent the day trying to pin it down and the answer remains elusive:

    Is the new “LoRa Basics Station”, aka “Basic Station”, in the new firmware version 5.3.0 compatible with the old MTAC-LORA-1.0 USB Lora cards?

    I have a MTCDT-H5-210A Conduit and have recently upgraded the firmware. At the same time I was looking to upgrade the packet forwarder and noticed Basic Station is the recommended path. I’ve successfully installed it, configured it to forward to The Things Network. It runs happily and checks-in with TTN, but never uploads any packets and never updates its conf file from the server.

    If I run station manually to see the logs, I see that it repeatedly loops around trying to connect to the server. There’s lots of error messages but from what I can see most of them are normal. The not-so-normal error is says: “Concentrator start failed: lgw_start”

    One thing I tried was changing the SPI device setting in station.conf. Putting in an invalid path did not change the log outcomes!

    That lead me to believe that the software wasn’t hitting the LoRa card at all.

    So is the new “LoRa Basics Station” compatible with the old MTAC-LORA-1.0 USB Lora cards? If so, is there any special configuration?

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Heath Raftery. Reason: typos
    January 5, 2021 at 8:00 pm #31499
    Heath Raftery
    Participant

    Sure enough, I tried again on another Conduit that also has a 1.0 card and had the same (non) result. I then tried on yet another Conduit (a MTCDT-247A this time) with a 1.5 card, using the same procedure, and this time it worked.

    January 6, 2021 at 8:45 am #31504
    Jason Reiss
    Keymaster

    The USB cards are only supported for use with the UDP packet forwarder.

    New card designs are using SPI and HAL is only provided for the SPI interface with the latest software from Semtech.

    January 6, 2021 at 3:57 pm #31512
    Heath Raftery
    Participant

    Great. Hopefully this thread saves someone else 8 hours of futile debugging!

    January 7, 2021 at 7:59 am #31515
    Jason Reiss
    Keymaster

    I added a note in the doc.
    http://www.multitech.net/developer/software/lora/running-basic-station-on-conduit/

    Here is a link to the Basic Station documentation.
    https://doc.sm.tc/station/

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