Spent a day last month at a yard installing three new Echolo gateways. Some notes I wish I’d had before I went.
”Line of sight” is a lie in a yard
The gateway datasheet says 40 meters indoor, 120 meters line-of-sight outdoor. Both of those numbers are honest. Neither of them describes a yard.
A yard is dense steel: lifts parked in rows, stacks of material, shipping containers used as sheds. BLE at 2.4 GHz bounces badly off large flat metal surfaces and gets absorbed by concrete. The practical coverage of a gateway, in that environment, is more like 15–20 meters reliable, 25 meters intermittent.
That means more gateways than the datasheet suggests. We typically plan for 1 gateway per 20×20 meter zone, with overlap, rather than one per site.
The best mount is the one that doesn’t move
I’ve seen installers put gateways on temporary equipment: a lift that moves weekly, a trailer, a light pole that gets relocated. It’s always a mistake. The instant the gateway moves, your coverage map is wrong and you start getting ghost alerts about assets that “left” a zone that actually just shifted on its axis.
The fix is simple: mount gateways to the building shell (roof trusses, permanent walls, loading-dock structures). If nothing in the yard is permanent, mount them on concrete bollards sunk into the ground.
Power is the hardest part
You can run cellular backhaul forever. You can feed a gateway off PoE. What you can’t easily do in a yard is find 120V AC within 50 feet of the optimal mounting spot.
Solar-powered gateways with battery backup solve this, but they’re bigger and uglier than their wired counterparts. We default to wired where possible and solar where necessary. The cost difference is significant; the reliability difference is too.
The hub is more important than the tag
Our first 12 months of support tickets taught us something obvious in hindsight: when telemetry goes missing, the tag is almost never the problem. The gateway is.
Gateways have firmware, radios, cellular modems, TLS certificates, queue storage, power supplies, and enclosures rated for yards that occasionally catch fire. Tags are a BLE chip and a coin cell. If you’re going to spend time hardening anything, harden the gateways.
What a successful install looks like
At the end of a good install day, you want:
- Every gateway visible in Fleet, reporting signal strength and firmware version.
- Overlapping coverage verified by walking the yard with a test tag and seeing multiple gateways report the beacon.
- A picture of every gateway’s exact mounting location, because the maintenance person in six months is not you.
- Cellular coverage checked at each gateway (not at the site entrance).
- The site’s ops lead knowing who to call when something breaks.
The last one is the most important. Installing the hardware is 80% of the work. Teaching the site how to live with it is the other 80%.