The smart gateway sits between your LoRa modems and the outside world. It listens to local traffic, applies rules, and forwards what matters — over LoRa WAN to another site, up to a satellite when there’s no tower in sight, across mobile data or plain SMS for alerts, or back into a wider MeshCore network.
The key word is smart. Your local LoRa band might be busy — dozens of sensors reporting temperatures, tank levels, gate states, soil moisture, every few minutes. You don’t need all of that going out over an expensive satellite link. The gateway watches every packet, and by rules you define it pulls out only what you asked for — a daily aggregate over Iridium at 09:00, an SMS if a pump fails, and a live mobile-data dashboard for the operator on the hill.
LoRa WAN bridging
Forward traffic between local modems and a remote LoRa WAN installation over the internet — your sensors talk to a gateway kilometres away as if it were right next to them.
Satellite backhaul
Push data to Iridium or other LEO satellite services when the site is beyond mobile coverage — the gateway queues packets and transmits on the next satellite pass.
Mobile data & SMS
Relay alerts and status over LTE or plain SMS. The gateway fires off a text when a sensor breaches a threshold, or makes a rules summary available over a mobile data link for remote operators.
MeshCore relay
Join a local MeshCore network to a wider mesh across sites — the gateway repeats traffic from one mesh into another, or bridges mesh nodes into a LoRa WAN network server.
Rules engine — the smart part
The gateway runs a local rules engine that watches every packet on the LoRa band and decides what to do with it. Rules are how you tell it what matters.
Filter and aggregate. Forty soil sensors firing every five minutes — that’s 11,500 packets a day. You don’t want those queued to a satellite. Instead, a rule can collect all soil readings across the day, compute min/max/mean per probe, and push a single 200-byte summary over Iridium on a scheduled transmission window. The local LoRa chatter stays local; only the digest leaves the site.
Alert on exceptions. A pump drawing twice its normal current, a gate open longer than ten minutes, a node that stopped reporting three hours ago. Rules can fire an SMS immediately — no cloud, no polling, no delay. The gateway watches the band and acts the moment a condition trips.
Route by urgency and cost. Each backhaul has a cost profile: satellite is expensive and low-bandwidth, SMS is cheap per-message but slow, mobile data is fast and flat-rate if you’re in coverage. Rules assign a priority, and the gateway chooses the cheapest path that meets the deadline. A daily summary goes over satellite at the next pass; a fire alarm goes over every available backhaul right now.
Condition chaining. Rules can feed one another — aggregate tank levels into a daily report and also watch for a low-level condition that fires an SMS. One rule collects, another watches the collected value. Everything runs on the box, offline-first, no cloud dependency.
Remote access tunnel
A secure tunnel lets you reach the gateway’s local LoRa network from anywhere. Open a web dashboard for a remote sensor, push firmware to a deployed modem, or run the Scope analyser against a site you’re not standing in — the gateway forwards the serial protocol over the backhaul link so your local tools work as if you’re on site.
That includes an AI agent. Point an agent at the tunnelled analyser and it can monitor, inject, and emulate on a remote site’s LoRa band from anywhere — see AI & automation.
Multi-radio
Dedicated radios for local LoRa and backhaul — the gateway listens on one channel while transmitting on another, so local traffic never pauses for satellite or mobile uplinks.
Low power, always on
Runs from battery and solar, with deep-sleep between satellite passes or scheduled mobile-data windows. Designed for sites with no mains power.
Secure by default
TLS on every backhaul link, AES on stored packets, and authenticated access to the remote tunnel — because the gateway is the door between your LoRa network and everywhere else.
Queue & prioritise
Priority queues for each backhaul transport — satellite slots are scarce, SMS is slow, mobile data costs metered. The gateway chooses the cheapest path that meets the rule’s urgency.
The gateway is the piece that turns a single-site LoRa deployment into a connected, remote-managed network. Built on the same hardware and firmware foundation as the Scope analyser, with the same field-proven radio stack.