Remember that story about the TTN Gateway 75km away? It wasn’t

Last Monday I took my TTN-mapper node with me in the car driving from home (Deurne) to Nijmegen, to Arnhem, to Veenendaal and back home again in the evening. The gateways found were not really surprising. None for most of the trip to Nijmegen, good coverage in Nijmegen and Arnhem (and in between) . But there was one gateway that surprised me. While driving through “De Rips” (population 1,179 in 2011) a total of 3 packages arrived at a gateway.

According to TTN Mapper and the metadata available at The Things Network, this gateway was located in Bilthoven at the, 75 km from the place where the package was sent. On Monday I could not figure out what could have gone wrong. The gateway was registered by the RIVM, the coordinates registered was as the RIVM in Bilthoven. But 75 km sounded as too good (far) to be true (possible).

I’ll skip to the conclusion: it was, the gateway was not located in Bilthoven, it was much closer.

Today, Derko from the RIVM (the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment) contacted me by e-mail because he had seen my tweet about their gateway. I pointed him to the post (in Dutch) that I wrote about it. In his mail he had already explained that the gateway was indeed a Lorank 8 (and not a single channel gateway as TTN Mapper assumed, but since then has corrected) and was located indoors. This made the 75 km even more unlikely.

About half an hour after my reply, Derko responded again. He felt sorry for me, but had bad news. Reading about the location from where I had been able to reach their gateway, he realized that only recently, they had installed a new gateway at one of their locations where they measure air quality. And you might have already guessed: that location was close to De Rips, it was at Vreedepeel, about 3.5 – 4 km and not 75 km from the location of my node. The location data for that gateway had not been updated when it was installed.

Derko since then changed the data for the gateway, so it now correctly shows its location:

TTNMapper hasn’t updated it on the map yet (I’m guessing that is a batch process), but the change in location is listed on this page: https://ttnmapper.org/gateway_moves.php (search for 1DEE0348A7BB4EC8) so it should be corrected in not to long.

Am I sad that it wasn’t 75 km? No, not at all. It was highly unlikely and I’m happy that the puzzle has been solved (thanks Derko!). The RIVM gateway is not the only gateway that has incorrect location information.

I took the TTN-mapper node with me today in the train to Deventer and back. And in Deventer a gateway was active that has its coordinates set to South Africa. It confuses TTNMapper because it by default zooms out to a view where all the gateways are visible.

Ook het @Het_Kadaster in Apeldoorn is te zien vanuit Zutphen @ttnmapper @TTNApeldoorn @thethingsntwrk pic.twitter.com/XBwEdusfUO

— Pierre Gorissen (@PeterMcAllister) June 19, 2019

But I prefer to focus on the plausible “cool results”, like the fact that apparently I could reach the “Grote Kerk” in Deventer and het Kadaster in Apeldoorn (see map in tweet above) at the same time. Both about 12 km or 18 km from where I was. Still impressive.