My house is all concrete and double brick and my Z-Wave reception was unreliable at best. Dotting a bunch of repeaters seemed to help but it was still not great. I found the biggest impact was the location and positioning of the Z-Wave Controller as it’s reception is unfortunately not that great. I struggled to balance a location with good reception with the practicability of where to put the PC/Controller.
I did not have these issues when testing a Fibaro Home Center 2 all-in-one soln, as it has an external antenna… but I’d chosen to go with OH so that HW was out.
So I got a 2nd Z-Wave Stick and set about modifying it to see if I could boost it’s reception so I could then have more location options. Here is what I did:
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Popped off the plastic cover of the Z-Wave stick
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Carefully scraped back the top layer to expose the copper of the internal antenna near “L7”. This is where I will then solder the centre pin of the shown SMA Connector.
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Cut the internal antenna where shown (it looks like a 1/4 wave) so it is “disconnected”
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Put a blob of solder on the exposed copper first then when heated it back up while positioning the centre pin into this. It’s bit fiddly but to to bad
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Soldered a bit of wire from Ground to a Leg of the SMA Connector
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On the reverse side of my mod, I used 2 part epoxy to glue the connector to the main board of the Z-Wave Stick so that movement will not (hopefully) crack the solder joints.
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The rest is more cosmetic. I needed to clip a bit out of the plastic covers to give clearance to the SMA Connector but once that was done it did “click” into place, but I then also wrapped that end of the Controller with some clear tape to hold it together.
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And finally, all I needed to do was attach an Antenna of the correct wavelength and test it out! In this case I got what looks like a full wavelength antenna, but given the Controller now has a SMA Connector, it could be any suitable one.
Thanks
Nathan