Has anyone seen this teardown of a LoRaWAN gateway with satellite backhaul?

Just watched this video where a guy tears apart an APAL Hestia A2 — it's a LoRaWAN gateway that uses satellite (3GPP NTN via Skylo) instead of WiFi or cellular for backhaul.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4q7l_8pQHg

Honestly I went in expecting another generic IoT product unboxing but ended up going down the comment section rabbit hole for like an hour. 180+ comments and people are actually having real technical discussions — Modbus/RS-485 integration, SCADA use cases, someone asking about marine fleet tracking, another person running weather stations on a ranch with zero cell coverage.

The thing that caught my attention is the satellite backhaul part. I've been messing around with LoRa nodes for remote sensor stuff and the backhaul problem is always where it falls apart — you either need a gateway with internet access somewhere, or you're duct-taping a cellular modem to the setup. This thing apparently just talks to a satellite directly.

Now the obvious catch: 30KB/month on the data plan. Some people in the comments were calculating that's roughly one GPS ping every 12 minutes, which sounds tight. But if you're doing basic telemetry — temperature readings, soil moisture, water level checks — someone did the math and said that's around 2,500 sensor readings a month. Not bad for stuff that just needs to phone home a number every few minutes.

It also apparently supports Raspberry Pi and has RS-485 for industrial setups. A few people in the comments were talking about NodeRED integration which would make the whole pipeline way less painful.

Curious if anyone here has hands-on experience with this or something similar. Specifically wondering about:
– Real-world range on the LoRa side in rough terrain
– How reliable the satellite uplink actually is (latency, dropped packets, etc.)
– Whether 30KB/month is actually workable for a real deployment or if you hit the wall fast

Would love to hear from anyone running off-grid sensor networks.

LoRaWAN gateway with built-in satellite uplink — could this work as a Meshtastic-to-cloud bridge?

Stumbled on this teardown video of something called the APAL Hestia A2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4q7l_8pQHg

It's a LoRaWAN gateway with a built-in satellite modem (Skylo / 3GPP NTN) — so it doesn't need WiFi or cell service at all for backhaul. The comment section has a bunch of people asking the same thing I'm wondering: could you use something like this as a bridge to get Meshtastic data up to the cloud from a completely off-grid location?

Right now my Meshtastic setup works great for node-to-node, but the moment I want to push data to a server — MQTT, a dashboard, whatever — I need at least one node that has internet. And in the spots I'm deploying (backcountry, no cell), that's the part that always sucks.

This gateway apparently comes with 30KB/month of satellite data included. That's not much, but for forwarding position reports or sensor telemetry from a mesh network it might be enough. Someone in the comments calculated ~2,500 small readings per month.

It has RS-485 and supposedly works with Raspberry Pi, so in theory you could have a Pi running Meshtastic, collecting packets, and then forwarding select data through this gateway's satellite link.

Has anyone tried anything like this? Or is there a better way to get Meshtastic data out of a no-internet zone that I'm missing?

A — LoRa / RPi 愛好者 · 發文後 2–3 hr

This is pretty cool. Any idea how much this thing costs? And is it just the hardware or does the satellite plan come included?

└ OP 回覆： I looked it up after watching the video — it's on Amazon. The gateway is around $200 range and yeah the satellite plan is included (30KB/month). There's also a smaller dongle version if you just want LoRaWAN without the industrial I/O. I think someone in the YT comments mentioned a code APALSAVE10 for 10% off but not sure if it's still active.

B — 農場/牧場遠端監控 · 發文後 4–6 hr

Man I wish I saw this 6 months ago. I've been trying to get soil moisture and tank level data off a ranch property with zero cell service. Ended up rigging a cellular booster that barely works. The satellite backhaul thing would solve my exact problem. Does anyone know if it works reliably in bad weather or if the satellite link drops out?

C — Meshtastic 社群 · 發文後 5–8 hr

Interesting that it's LoRaWAN and not just raw LoRa. So in theory you could run a Meshtastic node that forwards select packets to this gateway via a Pi, and then it pushes to the cloud over satellite. Has anyone figured out a clean way to bridge Meshtastic MQTT to a LoRaWAN payload? The 30KB cap means you'd want to be pretty selective about what gets forwarded.

└ OP 回覆： Yeah that's exactly what I was thinking. You'd probably want a NodeRED flow on the Pi that filters which Meshtastic channels get forwarded and compresses the payload before handing it to the LoRaWAN stack. 30KB is tight but if you're only sending GPS + a couple sensor values you might be fine. Someone in the YT comments said they got it working with CayenneLPP format which is pretty compact.

D — 船隊管理 · 自然帶出購買連結

Just ordered one. I run a small boat fleet and we've been using Iridium for position tracking which costs a fortune. If this can do basic GPS telemetry over satellite for way less I'm willing to try it. For anyone looking — found it on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0F74DDPJ9. Will report back once I get it set up.