Amazon Sidewalk Test Kit & ZWave

💬 Lounge
1

For the past few weeks, all my zwave things have been shitty. Slow to respond or not responding at all.

I just realized that this may have coincided with me getting an Amazon Sidewalk Test Kit: Amazon Sidewalk, which uses 900MHz LoRa.

I took the test kit device out of the house today and my zwave stuff seemed to come back alive.

Something to keep an eye on as sidewalk devices enter the market and the 900MHz radio on Amazon Echos and Ring devices start getting busy...

4 Likes
2

That could have something to do with it, but a counterpoint is that I have five different lora networks in my house right now (a few in production, and a few for development work), and a 90 plus device Z-Wave mesh, all working just fine.

My main hubitat and main lora hubs are about 3 ft from each other.

I'm not saying you're wrong, or that it couldn't happen. But in my experience, unless you put the radios right on top of each other, one is malfunctioning, one is spewing a crazy amount of traffic out, it usually is not a problem.

1 Like
3

FWIW, Amazon Sidewalk uses LoRA, but also uses FSK at 900 MHz for other purposes (connecting to older devices like baby monitors). I know in the old days baby monitors were claimed to interfere with z-wave.

So I wonder if FSK at 900 MHz has something to do with the interference. And this is presumably absent in your pure LoRA networks.

4 Likes
4

Ah, good to know. I've never looked into Amazon sidewalk at all, so I didn't know that.

Thanks for educating me, once again.

1 Like
5

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.