Vera Lite - Antenna Upgrade - My Experience

Community Playground General Discussions
1

Hi all,

Using Vera Lite with UI5 (1.5.672 for Heavy Duty Switch) with a mix of 30 real & virtual devices by way of this calculation.

Living in old 2-storey house with up to 2 foot thick walls. Have Z-wave devices spread throughout the house and Vera Lite in the centre, but was getting ongoing problems with scenes, devices disappearing, heating not coming on at scheduled times etc. Heals / repairs etc. did not cure problem and I was considering removing Vera altogether.

As a last effort, I decided to upgrade the antenna with advice mostly taken from here (thanks Sanuja!). I bought this antenna, and this cable. NB the antenna is a 1/4 wave antenna tuned (cut to suit) to 868Mhz (this is for Europe) and it was fitted with an SMA Male connector. The cable is 10cm SMA Female jack to U.fl/IPX Pigtail Antenna Cable at 1.13mm. You can get longer than 10cm but the Vera Lite is small and longer cable leads to more attenuation so aim for shortest. Open Vera Lite, disconnect internal antenna and tape it up, drill and fit new antenna as per picture to finish.

After installing, I ran a repair overnight. It felt like it was a day or two before things were working properly again but the improvement in performance is massive. Before adding the antenna, I was getting 2-3 stars on the repair report for most devices and some didn’t show at all. After the install, ALL devices are 5 stars and I have not had a device disappear since.

Long story short, well worth the small expense and effort for such a significant improvement.

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Glad you got it working and are enjoying a signal improvement.

Did you not see the stickied thread at the top of the General section? At 19 pages, it’s got a bit of useless cruft, but it’s got all the pertinent info and pictures and anecdotal results. If I recall correctly, Sanuja’s blog post was drawn from that.

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Thanks for adding that Zwaver - I may have found it originally but couldn’t find the best place to post this using the forum search so thought I’d start a new thread that would make it easier to find for others.

I have also added a few specific details which might help others, such as the male/female connections (ended up with 2 male connections first time ordering!) and a link to an eBay seller who actually cuts the antenna to match the frequency, which might be particularly handy for other regions and devices.