After getting all of the initial bits set up while at my desk, I was unfortunately unable to reach any LoraWan gateway on The Things Network.
Given that I was testing it at my desk indoors, I knew that this wasn’t the optimal situation. So I decided to try it from the back deck of our carriage house, which is about 15 feet (5 meters) up from the ground and faces the gateway in Comox that is nearest to me, about 2.5kms away.
The trick is, I don’t have a laptop to try it with! I had considered maybe setting up a Raspberry Pi up in the suite, but luckily I was able to save myself that effort and just use my old android phone with a serial monitor and a little USB-OTG cable that I already had. This is more portable, especially if I want to try connecting from a different location later on.
A few things are not optimal: firstly, the antennas I have are not tuned to be used as Lora antennas; secondly, there’s a forest between me and the gateway, and probably some houses on the other side of the forest; and thirdly, I really don’t know what I’m doing 
, so there’s a chance I’m missing some other critical step 
Unfortunately, it still didn’t connect. I might try driving closer to the gateway at some point, but for now I think I’ll just continue on with the image detection part of the challenge using the Nicla Vision.
Ps, does anyone know if I have to specify which gateway I intend to connect to? I’m wondering if that’s part of the problem
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