I did a module on this last term, and then spent a summer placing gateways at a dairy, so here goes.
Mesh works at home because the routers are mains powered and always listening. LoRaWAN end devices are battery sensors that sleep almost all the time and only open short receive windows after they send. A sleeping node can’t forward anyone else’s traffic, so the network is a star of stars instead: every gateway in range hears every uplink, and the network server throws away the duplicates. More gateways means more coverage, and on Hermetry a device message is stored once no matter how many gateways heard it.
James, the Pending status is real, it’s for relay gateways that were seen but not accepted yet. A relay is still one more box to place and power though, and for four sensors behind one warehouse a second gateway is simpler.
Your two heard devices are joining at SF12 with SNR around -15, which is at the edge. The join request gets through, but the join accept has to come back to the device 5 s later in RX1, or 6 s in RX2 at 869.525 MHz (DR0), and at that margin the downlink often doesn’t make it. The other two probably never reach the gateway at all.
Put a second gateway on the warehouse itself, ideally on the side facing those sensors. It can be another Basics Station gateway or a licensed router with a LoRa radio. Both register to the same network server and the sensors just use whichever hears them best.
Relays and the other ways to extend coverage: Local mode and relays