This is a question to Hubitat engineers.
Have you ever considered adding a connector for an external antenna?
There are broadband antennas that opperates in the range 800 MHz to 2500 MHz, this could improve the RF range in most cases.
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I wouldn't really think it was necessary as both z-wave and zigbee are based on mesh principals. As long as their is a mains powered item or a repeater in the mix things can go pretty far. Then there is the case of zigbee interfering with wifi in general and overpowering the local spectrum.
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How does the Z-Wave LR capability of these new chips fit in to the picture?
It doesn't. There is no external antenna requirement in Zwave LR.
Personally, I think there should be (in a future hardware rev) - like is typically done on LoRa (which uses the same frequencies). But that is really only necessary if you are going for the real "long range" 1km+. Even in LoRa inside/consumer LoRa gateways use internal antenna.
For consumer use the internal antenna should cover even the largest residential property.
Now... With dynamic power management a better signal strength = lower battery consumption, so there is always that angle in justifying an external antenna on future hardware revs.
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Think of the range!
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Z-Wave Super-Duper Long Range.
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Nice one, now you can deploy sensors on Mars.
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But they'll be zooz and cause problems with the mesh.... (running and ducking)
That's OK, all you need to do is a factory reset on your sensor . . . that is on Mars . . .
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Ha! Remotely start turning on and off lights at the Mars basecamp just to mess with them.
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farfarout hubitat
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I think HE went with aesthetics first. Whatever little tiny patch antenna they used, is much worse than the ST antenna or even Iris antenna. Many users have echoed the same thing. I know they'll say they're "counting on the mesh", but what if you don't have a very large house or mesh?
The current antenna is weak, at least weaker than other competing products and I like to see options. Don't know if it's that simple tho, looking around it appears the antenna has to be matched to the transmitter and frequency of transmission
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Keep in mind that boosting just the transmitter with a larger and higher gain antenna only helps half of the communication. These home automation devices depend on a bi-directional communication, so boosting one direction does nothing for the returning direction. This is why when you see long haul wireless backhauls they have equal size units/antennas on both sides of the connection, or it will not work.
The wireless devices you are connecting to Hubitat have very small, low power radios, low gain antennas. This is why we use a mesh technology, so you don't have to always have a great direct signal all the way back to the hub, you can bounce through neighbors with better signal to that location.
Respectfully, you are wrong. Have you ever taken a course in antenna theory? I doubt it. Received power is a function of the product of the transmitting antenna’s gain times the receiving antenna’s gain. You can either beef up the transmitting antenna or the receiving antenna, and get the same improved received power. By Friis Transmission Formula,
Because of the symmetry, you can interchange the transmitting and receiving antennas and get the same result,
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@672southmain Well thanks for slapping the dunce hat on me, much appreciated.
True I have not taken any classes, but have made a career around RF in networking (802.11 Wi-Fi and cellular). Every time I've seen a customer just strap a high gain antenna on the access point and think that will make all the connecting clients magically work better has failed miserably. But what do I know as I'm not a professor like yourself, will return to my corner now.
Just yesterday I checked the range of my new Fibaro Fob. I was several hundred feet from my house before I lost contact.
Mike M
I've no background in antenna theory, but have read that with wifi, if you boost your transmit signal too high it creates problems, as the cellphone in the backyard can clearly "hear" the router but the low power cellphone(or say zigbee sensor) can't reach the router, with it's much lower transmit power.
Does the larger antenna on 1 side help with that?
got a new emoji for you
JK
I’m not sure I understand your question. I was only talking about antennas and antenna gain, nothing more. As I understand your example, you are talking about bi-directional devices.
Also, there are assumptions made in the antenna equation, namely, linearity, which doesn’t consider noise or interference. Cell phones use a quadrature amplitude modulation system to increase the bit rate, which makes them susceptible to noise and interference.
The point was, and I still remember it from a problem set over 50 years ago in college, that you could swap the transmitter and receiver antennas and get the same result. So, a bigger transmitter antenna has the same effect as a bigger receiving antenna. That’s why satellites, with their small antennas (because of the low power budget and high cost to put payloads into orbit) are compensated by big antennas on the ground. The problem with this is background noise. In the absence of noise, the antenna formula works well. In the presence of noise, the noise can be of comparable strength to the desired signal sent through the channel. If the noise is Gaussian white noise, then there are signal modulation techniques that can overcome the noise because the modulated signal will look sufficiently different from the noise, providing that you don’t exceed the bandwidth of the channel.
In the example you gave, and in Zigbee / Z-Wave situations, the noise is not Gaussian white noise, but, instead is competing similar transmissions (WiFi interference, adjacent channel transmissions, etc) that can overwhelm the desired signal. Yes, increasing the transmitter or receiver antenna gain will increase the power of the received signal, but will also increase the received noise if the receiver’s antenna gain is what is being increased.
Clearer?
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