While trying to find why most of my forwarded packets are not showing on TTN I found something interesting.
The last few days the gateway was running gps_pkt_fwd to forward packets and send statistics to TTN. To see if using the normal forwarder would improve the number of packets showing in TTN I switched back to it.
I immediately noticed a significant improvement with regards to amount of packets being received without CRC errors. With the gps forwarder an average of 1 in 6 packets is received correctly. With the normal forwarder being used I'm now getting 1 in 1, there is data in tcpdump every time the node sends data.
If MultiTech is on board (from what I could make out this evening during the big event hangout they are), I would love to work with them getting the forwarder with (fake) gps running as well as the basic one does. Now it seems I have to choose between status information forwarded to TTN (and the gateway status being 'up' in the network) and good packet reception.
(Gateway is running lora-packet-forwarder_1.4.1-r8.16)