[danaos]

Connecting two Lora modules ad hoc has always been possible. The catch is you won't be part of the LoraWan network.

[zoobab]

I would say boycott LoraWan.

You are only feeding Semtech, the Microsoft of Lora, which has the patents on basic information encoding/decoding.

The only gateways you can have which listen on multiple channels are damn expensive.

[zaarn]

Gateways are about 200$ fully assembled, it's not that expensive. (Source: I built a gateway with 8 channels)

[bipson]

What's the benefit of being part of this network?

Isn't LoRa basically just intended to be used one-way/upstream, i.e "node --> gateway --> end-device"? What am I missing?

[Maxious]

You can use other gateways in the same network to communicate in both directions with your device. There are also proposals to allow roaming for devices to communicate over multiple networks.

See ttnmapper.org for the level of coverage and https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/network/architecture.h... for an explanation of "downlink" return messages