FAQ - disk91/helium-chirpstack-community GitHub Wiki

I don't see the Metrics

To get Metrics from your device, you need to have a working Codec. When you see in your device eventtab messages with UPLINK_CODEC Level ERROR it means you codec contains errors and can't be executed.

Please refer to chirpstack codec documentation to solve this

My device is not Joining

At first, you must understand that more than 20K devices run on the platform, as a consequence device problem are mostly related to devices, you can eventually check the service status page.

The usual reasons why a device is not joining are the following:

• The device is too close from the gateway (hotspot). It's due to the signal strength too high and saturating the device receiver. The recommended minimal distance is 20-30 meter with a wall separating them.
• The device is too noisy. Having a device close to a computer, connected to a computer can make electromagnetic noise around it and reduce it's ability to receive the downlink (JOIN ACCEPT) message. Best is to use a long USB cable when developing or move the device about 1-2 meter from a source of noise.
• The device is too far from the gateway (hotspot). Helium does not select the best hotspot in a radio point of view but the fastest to respond. As part of the receiving hotspot, one will be selected by the (LNS) console to provide the downlink. LNS makes the best choice but it's ability to choose is limited to the helium selected one. In Tenant details menu, you can change the max copy value for your tenant, this will increase the number of selected hotspot by the Helium network and gives more choice to the LNS to select a good one. The impact of this is a higher communication cost as up max copy packets costing DCs for each of them.