RF Isolation Chamber / Box

LPWAN Developer Gateways / Concentrators RAK2247
1

I am using several units with RAK2247 and would like to run several LoRa units in parallel on the same channel. This is not that possible due to RF interference and I am looking for a suitable for LoRa RF chamber / box in which I can put LoRa devices to isolate one setup from another.

I attempted various RF isolation boxes which did not isolate well enough as LoRa still works in very poor RF channel conditions, so I am looking for a box that can fit to my needs.

Does anyone have an idea what box can do the job?

I am working in 433MHz frequency band (Europe).

Thank you,
C

2

Hello @celster,

Can you give us some more information, I am not quite sure what you want to do and what exactly is the issue you are facing?
How many units of RAK2247 are you using? How are you running them in parallel? What is causing the interference, is it your nodes, how many are there, etc?

Regards
Vladislav

3

Lets say I have 5 LoRa gateways (lets say I gave them the following names: GW1, GW2, GW3, GW4 and GW5), each one based on one RAK2247. Each such gateway talks to 10 nodes. All these gateways and nodes operate on the same channel - lets say channel 1.

I need to ensure that nodes that talk to GW1 will not hear other gateways (GW2 to GW5).

Basically I am looking for RF conducted / connected / isolated setup for each gateway with its nodes.

Thanks,
C

4

Am…as I can not state that I understand the point of this :slight_smile: You can check this https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/how-to-make-a-box-that-blocks-rf-signal/ if you not already done.
I suppose this will be for some comparison of communication between different gateways?

5

Thank you very much Todor.

Actually I have few RF boxes but their isolation is not great when using LoRa.

I would guess that RAK Wireless have isolated conducted setups. Anyone from RAK wireless could maybe point what type of RF conducted setups are you guys using?

Thank you.

C

6

This really doesn’t make much sense.

First, if you are only going to use one channel (and obey whatever legal restrictions on usage rate that may impose) then there’s limited reason to use an actual LoRa gateway. Gateways are built to support LoRaWAN’s usage of multiple channels, and multiple spreading factors.

Next the reality of shared frequency spectrum is that not only will you pick up signals from your other systems in range, you will pick up signals from other people’s systems, as well.

The way that is handled is not by shielding the undesired signals, but by having software ignore anything not addressed to you. Both LoRaWAN nodes and LoRaWAN network servers necessarily do such filtering - because the traffic is at least nominally encrypted, they cannot make sense of traffic that is not theirs anyway.