Recently I have added an external antenna to a few Z Wave devices, which had poor reception outdoors in waterproof boxes. The connection between these devices has been massively improved.
My controller is in the basement directly under the basement ceiling. It is currently a Z-Stick 7 from Aeotec. So I thought with a better antenna I would be able to increase the range of my controller.
I have a total of almost 50 z-wave devices. Before the upgrade, the controller had 27 direct connections.
Since the upgrade everything has been working as usual, but there has been no increase in direct connections to the controller. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that the network has become a little more reliable/ responsive.
I also had a few screenshots from Z-Wave JS UI from before and after the conversion, which I will upload later.
Does anyone else have experience with upgrading antennas for z-wave devices?
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No direct experience but I do know you must have an antenna length that matches the wavelength in some way. I am sure there are better wireless people than me that can tell you exactly what to use.
According to this website, in the US, you are looking at 908.4MHz or 921.4MHz. So, you would need an antenna for use with that frequency.
I am thinking about how things would be done in any future home of mine and I would very much like to to move HA and other servers into a rack over running it on a Raspberry PI and possibly virtualize it in a physical hardware cluster. Since USB dongles would probably be a bad idea in that scenario would probably run into problems with range, if I ever do go down that route, I would think a Z-Wave and Zigbee adapter over IP would be a better solution or possibly an Ethernet adapter for USB, which you do use on virtual machines for things like licensing adapters… There are probably a few posts about that in here from people who have successfully done it. By going that route, you just run a couple Cat-5e/6 wires to somewhere central in your home to reach your devices (one for Z-Wave, one for ZIgbee…maybe even another for matter). Plus, if you run a Power over Ethernet switch, you might even be able to power those device(s) over those Cat-5e/6 cable runs.
Hi kahlzinger,
the z-wave frequency in my region is 868 MHz, so I bought a suitable antenna for that.
My Home-Assistant runs on a VM in the rack shown in the photos. Since the reception inside the rack is really poor, I had previously placed the dongle outside using a USB extension cable. With the antenna it can now be connected directly to the Synology Rackstation.
Home Assistant on a VM is no problem. Also not for USB devices. You have to install the appropriate drivers, then I don’t see any disadvantages.
Here are the promised before and after photos from ZWave JS UI
Before:
After:
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