External Antenna

I don't think enough vendors make enough of a point about the optimal orientation of their boxes for optimal antenna performance.

Thanks for that post.

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Quick update, 12 days after antenna upgrade, 65 of my 79 devices are direct connections to the hub. 73 of the devices have full 100k connection too. Very much improved! Thank you again @lewis.heidrick for posting the instructions.

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Have you added the external antenna? The people in this thread replaced the stock antennas with external antennas with a couple parts bough online and a little soldering.

A screenshot of you settings, zwave details would help troubleshooting.

Have you excluded and included the devices to join them to the Hubitat hub?

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no, I have not changed anything in the hub and have been suffering with this problem since the moment of purchase.

The signal strength received from many of your devices is really poor. And consistent with that, some of them have dozens of route changes.

I would also recommend using a z-stick to repair the S0 device, such that it pairs with no security.

The easiest way to improve signal quality is to do the external antenna mod described in this thread. However, be aware that it invalidates your hub warranty.

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He started a new topic over here for this...

He's got impressively low RSSI, coupled with impressively high RTT. It's most likely to be Distance or Interference, but only he knows his actual home layout, and materials.

If what I read is accurately interpreted, this is the antenna inside the Hub RF radiation pattern:

Since that "pcb" strip is adhered to the lid of the hub, it implies that you'll get better Upstairs/Downstairs numbers. The weak direction is Front to Rear, which would probably be made worse by the power and Ethernet wires (and most importantly the metal that surrounds those connectors internally.)

Many have mounted the Hub to a wall with the wires flowing downward... probably improving their horizontal RF radiation as a result.

All of the above MIGHT be true.. but what's also true is that the hub's RF only needs to reach the "first ring" of repeaters. After that it's unimportant.. from the RF side of the issue. :slight_smile: Latency increases with each repeater hop, of course.

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Just curious if the device count went up any more since your last post.

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Nah. It basically fluctuates between 82-92 but I’ve never seen it go down below 82 since it got that high. It’s at 84 right now so still nearly double what I started at before the mod.

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Similar observation. It bounces between 47-52 (out of 57). So basically double of where I started.

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Mine is holding steady at 62 out of 71 z-wave devices with direct connections. I feel sure that if I could find a more central position for the hub they would all be direct, but that's something to think about over time - it's working great anyway for now.

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Still that's a huge improvement. Hopefully you're happy with your mesh now and will stick around. :grinning:

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I haven't given up, but unfortunately, when one problem is resolved, another one appears :frowning:

I was wondering if your switches and automations continue to function even when those strange device types appear?

Function? Yes. But INCREDIBLY delayed, like 30-45 seconds of delay. So for example, I have an Inovelli switch at the top of a staircase. Double tapping it turns on both the staircase light and the separate switch in the downstairs hallway. By the time the lights turn on, I'm already down the stairs and through the hallway. Rebooting does not resolve. Shutdown,unplug for ~30s, then power up fixes it. So that makes me suspect it's radio related.

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That's pretty much non-functional in my book.

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Yeah, guess I just mean if the device eventually responds, it does mean the hub radio is broadcasting since the message is received, right? Going to update to 2.3.0 again soon. That was when I noticed the problem. I rolled back to 2.2.9 and haven't had issues

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There was a problem that was fixed in .113 that wasn’t in the release notes. It only effected one of my hubs.

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Hmm interesting. A Similar issue? I was told there were no zwave changes in 2.3.0, here's hoping it fixes it. I was on 107 when it happened. I just upgraded to 113

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It definitely wasn’t a z-wave thing. It had to do with event stream, but it caused the cpu usage to climb which caused everything to be delayed.
Let us know if it fixes your problem. For me the slowdown would begin 2 days after a reboot. I could watch the cpu usage start to climb after about a day and a half, and just steadily increase until accessing the web pages as well as any rules/automations would slow to about 15 seconds. Rebooting did temporarily resolve it, then the process would start over. I’m not sure which beta caused it due to the time it took to be noticeable.

Ok, that doesn't seem related then. This was before that bug was introduced and also this was having devices identified incorrectly by the zwave stack so my guess would be cpu slowdown wouldn't cause that (also, I don't have anything using eventstream)