RAK 2245 Pi Hat Rx LED always ON

LPWAN Developer Gateways / Concentrators RAK2245 / RAK2243
1

Hi All,

Got my new RAK 2245 Pi Hat and I see the Rx LED always ON. What could be the problem, I am new to LoRa.

Thanks,
Milind

2

The RX led should be on, as once the packet forwarder software starts up, it is constantly receiving a packet or in receive mode waiting for one.

The only exception would be light toggling very briefly to transmit while it is actually transmitting, but it would only transmit if a network server commanded it to reply to a packet from a node.

Software output and logs will generally be much more informative than the lights.

3

Thanks Chris,

Killed the lora packet forwarder process and checked it.

Bye

4

Hello,
I have the same issue. Anyone has a solution?

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Rev 1.0, OS “10 (buster)”, 5.10.63-v7+.
RAKWireless gateway RAK2245 version 4.2.7R install from source code.

5

What “issue” ? There is no problematic behavior reported anywhere in this thread.

7

It sounds the RX LED should not be always on.

Or is it normal that the RX LED is always on?

8

Indeed, the RX LED should be on, except when the gateway is in transmit mode.

The RX LED is connected to the same signal that controls any optional receiver low noise amplifier and flips the RF switch to connect the antenna to the receive pathway, so it will be on whenever the gateway is in receive mode, regardless if it is receiving a packet or simply waiting for one. And it will be off and the transmit LED on when the gateway is in transmit mode, as that’s driven by the other switch input / power amplifier control.

So it’s a mode LED, not a packet LED - perhaps things are confusing because the gateway only switches to transmit mode when it has a downlink to send, vs being in receive mode all of the rest of the time.

If you want a “got a packet” LED, you’d have to implement that by modifying the software and having it blink some LED connected to the pi/host computer GPIO. That would be better anyway, as you could route those LED signals out where they are visible, vs the ones on the mPCIe card hopefully being buried inside the assembly.

But since LoRaWAN gateways are rarely best installed in places where people are going to routinely be looking at them, ultimately the actual best is network-based reporting. Gateways regularly send out a summary of intact and corrupted packets received and transmitted in the last stats interval. A network server can make that (or its own counts) available to some monitoring API, or you can add your own additional monitoring path in parallel, ideally as part of what is also a remote administration solution.

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