Hi!
I'm a bit confused as to what the LoRaWAN functionality can be used for?
For example I have some remote solar powered 4-20mA sensors I want to access from my PLC. Can that be done by using something like http://www.netvox.com.tw/product.asp?pro=R718KA as remote device and a mikrotik LoRaWAN base station?
How would I access the value from the PLC then, can the mikrotik base station provide them as a modbus TCP server? I seen the knot has modbus TCP support so I guess routeros have some modbus functionality but can it be used in combination with LoRaWAN or how could I otherwise access them from a PLC? I seen MQTT is often mentioned in combination with LoRaWAN but my PLC doesn't speak MQTT.

Kind regards
David

The way it works is to create an account at a service like TheThingsNetwork (soon The Things Stack Community Edition) and add your LoRaWAN base station in their online console. Then you configure your base station to send the LoRa traffic to this service. In the online console of the service, you then create an application with devices, both consisting of some keys and identifiers, which need to be configured in your LoRaWAN sensor. Finally, you can use MQTT to subscribe to incoming data from your application at the service.

You could also host your own service if you don't want to share the gateway with other users nearby.

Tanks for your answer.
So there are no possibilities for accessing the values collected locally at the site? Cloud services are not an option for us as a municipality, everything needs to work without connections to the internet :(
How does the "host your own service" work? Clould is still required even when the gateway/base station is private?

I think collecting the data locally should be doable. I was just describing the standard way that you would use, if you also wanted nearby community to utilize your gateway.

You can set arbitrary servers to which the base station will send its data to. The protocol used is the one of the so called "Semtech UDP Packet Forwarder", which is probably also used by MikroTik in their product. There are quite some open source LoRaWAN server implementations available which support this protocol. Just search for "LoRaWAN server" on Google. Even the source of The Things Stack is open.