On May 28 and 29, 2025, the University of Montenegro's MONUSEN Center hosted an intensive expert visit and training titled "Acoustic-RF Gateway Technologies and Techniques," led by Dr. Ben Sherlock from Newcastle University. The event aimed to enhance the technical skills and innovative capabilities of researchers and project staff at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering.

The two day session began with an insightful introduction by Dr. Sherlock, outlining the training objectives, expected outcomes, and the essential tools for acoustic RF gateway development. Participants gained a comprehensive overview of gateway technologies, specifically focusing on low power networks, efficient sleep cycles, and data reduction techniques crucial for energy constrained applications.

A significant portion of the lecture was dedicated to practical, hands on activities, where participants engaged directly in configuring development environments and implementing gateway solutions. Under Dr. Sherlock's guidance, attendees successfully set up and programmed a LoRa based wireless gateway, beginning with creating a simple transparent serial link and progressing to more advanced stages involving MAC headers, packet queuing, and bidirectional communication control.

The second day of training highlighted reliability challenges encountered during the initial implementations. Dr. Sherlock presented effective methods to address these issues, including the integration of an Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) protocol featuring acknowledgments, sequence numbering, timeouts, retries, and random backoff mechanisms.

Participants concluded the training by exploring a practical scenario involving multiple acoustic sensors communicating via LoRa modules with a shoreside gateway. The final implementation stage allowed them to output packet data to a serial port for subsequent logging and offline analysis.

The event wrapped up with an interactive discussion session, enabling participants to consolidate their learning experiences and address any remaining questions. Overall, this expert visit significantly enhanced the University's capability in acoustic RF technologies, equipping researchers with both theoretical insights and hands on skills crucial for advancing underwater sensing networks.