Getting beyond frustrated. I think I am in over my head

[672southmain]

Just at a quick glance, it looks like you need some repeaters to strengthen your Z-Wave Mesh. The LWR RSSI column is a measure of signal strength:

@bcopeland

It is the received signal between the end device calculated across all the hops and calculated against the background noise level.. So a negative number means your signal is lower than the noise level, which means that at a minimum you will have a lot of re-transmits from dropped packets due to the receiver not being able to get the packet cleanly. .

I believe that tha Hubitat antenna has less gain than the SmartThings antenna. Perhaps it’s because of the smaller size. At least that’s what I decided when I came over from SmartThings just over a year ago. I just shrugged my shoulders and sprinkled Repeaters through our house, which improved signal strength. Signals get attenuated / reflected by brick, tile, mirrors, metal appliances, coke vending machine, metal coke signs, etc.

I use the Ring Alarm Range Extender Gen 2 (have 6 of them). They use the Z-Wave Plus 700 series chip and have an internal battery backup. They also send power fail events (switch from mains to battery) to the hub, so you can have a rule to shut down your hub cleanly on power fail (you do have your hub on a UPS, right?).

Seeing this, with all the negative LWR RSSI numbers, I understand better why you are getting the ghosts during pairing.