Here's my biggest beef with this no matter where I look everybody selling a kit not just the board. I can get a mini PCI card for $90 I don't need the raspberry pi or all the accessories why don't you start selling the board by itself and then I actually might purchase it because I have a real need for a decent Lora Gateway and I see that this will never take off in the United States if the price doesn't come down for the gateway hardware and a single channel gateway is not the right way to do it. I want to try to implement a citywide gateway network kind a like a APRS in the ham world but the cost is just too high for large scale implementation for non-commercial users would you mind selling me just the board itself I have everything else.

Can this be set up to received "simple" LoRa messages from multiple devices from without having to implement the full LoRaWAN protocol? For example, if I implement a "sender" using one of the RadioHead library examples, can this device receive and sort out messages received from multiple of such senders? Thanks

Ok so let's say we get the RAK from China, it's somewhat cheaper but when you add the antennas etc 200 bucks is actually a good deal. But that's not by beef - look at the acceptable TTN usage rules, really? Best thing is if you NEVER transmit LOL I would much rather use it on the Helium which is what the U.S. will end up using as the global coverage choice for LoRaWAN except Helium doesn't support much of the open source gateways just yet. Still the vehicle that will dominate us isn't TTN, just my 2 cents

Is your gateway the RAK7243C Pilot Gateway - LoRa - US915?

https://store.rakwireless.com/products/rak7243c-pilot-gateway?variant=26682434879588

I just recently installed one of those (not from Sparkfun but exactly the same KIT).

Compared with the RAK831 this is indeed a more affordable KIT (Arount $100USD less). The RAK2245 is exactly the same as the RAK831 but with a small form-factor. and already includes a GPS unit.

There is an issue however, with the small form-factor appears that RAK Wirelless didn't put too much attention to the design of the SPI traces on the Raspberry Pi Hat breakout. The original RAK831 KIT can support up to 4Mbps on the SPI bus, however on the RAK2245 it only supports 2Mbps on the bus. When you examine the code they use on the gateway you can verify that the patch applied to the lora-gateway library reduces the SPI speed.

On my unit there were flux residues between the headers, I had to clean them up to be able to start the gateway without troubles.

I would agree with the rest of the comments that only having the hat or even better only the 2245 gateway card could be a little bit better.

I think it would be even better if you have all the items required to build a decent gateway for exteriors. Any IP55 cage, plus u.FL to N + Lightning Protection + 50Ohm cable + Exterior Antenna would be great.

I can say once you put everything together the Gateway works great. We are getting 10 Km range with the one that we installed last week without trouble. Coverage map

I'm in the same boat as other commenters, I've got 3 pis collecting dust, all with power supplies/cases/storage already. If we could just get the concentrator board on its own I would buy it in a heartbeat, but I can't justify buying this whole bundle just for that.