Repurpose your MNTD RAK v2 Blackspot as a real LoRaWAN gateway with ChirpStack Gateway OS
With Helium mining economics being what they are, a lot of us have MNTD Blackspot miners sitting in a drawer. Good news: the hardware is actually a solid LoRaWAN gateway RAK2287 concentrator on an SX1302 chipset, Raspberry Pi 4 inside. It just needs a bit of coaxing to run ChirpStack Gateway OS properly.
The main gotcha that trips everyone up: the reset pin is GPIO 25, not GPIO 17 like ChirpStack OS assumes by default. Until you fix that one line in the config, you’ll get a blank Gateway ID and a concentrator that never actually starts.
I wrote up a full step-by-step guide covering:
• SX1302 concentrator config (RAK2287, correct channel plan)
• Disabling GNSS so it doesn’t boot-loop without a GPS antenna
• The GPIO 25 reset pin fix via SSH
• Wi-Fi stabilization (country code + WPA2-PSK + TX power) — the RPi4 Broadcom chip inside an aluminum box needs explicit regulatory config or modern routers will drop it
• Service restart sequence and how to verify the Gateway
EUI is actually being read
Repo with the full README on GitHub