I'm looking for some range extenders for my zigbee network and I'm looking for something I can add a larger antenna to. Amazon has the sonoff dongles on sale so I was going to purchase two and hopefully have them delivered to a fine member here who will flash them as routers for me and then mail them back.
I will prepay for everything via PayPal.
I know someone will say it's easy and you can just do it yourself but I have too many projects going on and not enough time for this simple task.
I'm hoping that these will get me further range than something like the Tuya range extenders as I will be able to add larger antennas to the Sonoff. I'm trying to get 500 ft across open air.
If somebody is interested in helping me out shoot me a PM and I'll set it all up.
Curious are you trying to get to another building? If so a second hub would be more reliable as wifi can easily make that gap with an outdoor wifi router.
Another option is LoRa, Yolink works with Hubitat.
I'm happy to flash your dongles for you - shouldn't take but 5 minutes. But I don't think you'll see anything like 500 feet with the 3 dBi antenna on there.
A while back, I tested this 2.4 GHz 14 dBi directional antenna as a zigbee antenna. And found both signal and noise to increase, rendering the effective line of sight range to 100-150 feet.
I would suggest considering @jnosa899's suggestion of a second hub.
I have a detached garage. In that garage I have a Sonoff wall wart. 500ft down my driveway I have a gate with a N/0 ZigBee relay. The wall wart surprisingly makes it more than 250' down.
I'm assuming my signal is coming from the wall wart as it's the closest but I have tons of hard wire zigbee devices in my home so it could be coming from one of them as well. I was able to get the relay to connect and function at about 250 ft down. My plan is to set a 12-ft pole at about the halfway point and use one of these USB antenna routers there and one back up the driveway in the garage.
Now that I've seen what you want to do, I can see why you'd want to try this. You might want to do it with 3-4 dongles (alternating on both sides of the driveway. It'll give the zigbee relay a chance to find multiple paths back to the hub.
You should buy the newer “Sonoff Dongle E”. It’s default transmission power is 20dbm. Unless @aaiyar has figured out how to get 20 on the older ones, I haven’t had time to mess with mine. Outside of that, they really aren’t difficult to flash. I used the TI software and @danabw wrote up the entire process for flashing them recently.
It’s a compile time option. And pretty easy to compile firmware using Koen Kanters instructions and cloning his repository. I’ve done it to two: one of slaesh’s dongles that I was using as a coordinator, and a Sonoff dongle-P. Took them up to 9 dBm. which is what was recommended at the time.
Eventually I'm going to have cat6 run all the way down there with a Poe access point in the middle but that's in the future and I need a solution for now so I can open the gate while in the house.
Appreciate the info. I read through the entire thread and started reading your PDF. Its way over my head.
This forum, mostly the members, are amazing. Everyone is always willing to help and the amount of information available is unbelievable. Forums are a dying breed as everything is moving to Facebook/Instagram which is a terrible way to gather information. You guys are awesome, Dont take this community for granted.
So Im going to find a couple P versions and send them to someone to get flashed and have the gain turned up. The E version can not be flashed to router as of now if Im reading all this right.
Does antenna size make a difference? Why dont more companies just make stronger routers? This seems like a no brainer.
If you want to ship them to me I'll flash them (takes all of two minutes) w/either the 220908 or 221102 FW (whichever you want) and ship them back to you. (Look at me, I'm an @lewis.heidrick mini-me!! He'd be so proud.) @user359 - You just pay for shipping each way. PM me if you're interested.
I know you have your mind set on this and please dont forget to share your results when your done. Please temper your expectations. This may be a struggle to make this happen. Do you have a plan B in place?
I'd also like to stress that these devices (I have the P and E versions), are like someone shouting in a room of whisperers - they can be really heard, but they drown everyone else out.
So, you have to be careful about channels and making sure that every channel is carefully planned out. Don't let your router decide on a channel - plan it out.
These are the strongest repeaters that I've ever seen - but with great power comes great responsibility.
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