I moved my bare metal Home Assistant OS to a Proxmox VM on a new NUC. Everything works fine but I had to move it back in my Utility Room and reception seems rather horrendous.
The use of a USB extension is the first thing, anyone would recommend. And me too. It sometimes makes huge difference.
Also, how long ago did you move the stick? It takes a time (could be even some days, until the driver rebuilds all routes. (Yes, you don’t need to force it, it happens automatically…) So, patience plays a role here too.
A change for a different stick is also a thing to consider. The 7 series Aeotec is well known for it’s problems.
I never hear complaints about the Zwave.me 5 series stick, I have that one too, and it is flawless…
Put it on an extender and attach it high up on an interior wall. Make sure it’s not on the other side of a tiled bathroom wall, concrete, near your WIFI router, other computers, etc.
Then to help it out a little, I’d rebuild routes one by one on the powered nodes starting from the physical closest. Then I’d bounce zwavejs to reset the device statistics.
See my other reply to you (different topic) on the 700 stick.
Usb extension cable did not help solving the problems with the 700.
I do use a 50cm cable from my NUC to the gen5+ stick.
Problem with the usb-c ports on the NUC is that those generate some HF noise, better to have the ZWave antenna from the stick a bit away from the port on the NUC.
This isn’t water of course It is a crappy job with expendable foam the previous owner has done and because it is located in our Utility Room… It is not a priority
Solar panels are coming in 10 days, the electrician will need an access to the electric board. It might be another good reason to redo something “clean” after that.
Yeah, that rack looks like a definite RF problem and getting the stick far away is only going to help. Signals in space decrease as a function of radius cubed. As for the best length, hard to know. I tried a very long cable first ~15’ and found that made it worse, eventually settled on a 6’ and that has been solid. If it’s working well, then you’ve found the right length.
Enable the diagnostic sensor in HA for the zwave devices. Add these to your recorder. Maybe create a purge script to discard them after 30 days. Then you can easily keep track / find noisy or misbehaving devices.
I was already using 7.21.2 for the last few weeks which was a bit less of a pain than all the others 7.19.x + firmwares. The issue with the controller jamming is still present on 7.21.4, happened 4 time in 2 days.
Looks better but still a ratio of dropped packets about 10x more than what I have. I have a similar network size,29 nodes, with a few ones having really bad connections
According the SiliconLabs release notes for V7.21.5, the locking/jamming problem is still not resolved. So no use trying the Z-Stick7 again (at least, not for me with a mesh of 66 z-wave devices. I’ll stick to the Gen5+ until release notes from SL mention that this issue is resolved).
Ugly for now.
It is a crappy job with expendable foam the previous owner has done and because it is located in our Utility Room… It is not a priority 
