The dipoles just arrived and I fitted one to the remote emonTx. The RSSI has gone from -71 ~ -75 to -62 ~ -64 so that’s a very good result. I probably won’t fit a dipole to the emonBase at present, since that involves soldering and hopefully the signal is now reliable.
I raised a bug about the data errors incorrect data recorded in feeds · Issue #1137 · emoncms/emoncms · GitHub but there’s no response yet.
-64 to -62 is a good solid RSSI, given the radio has an MDS level well under -100 dBm. If signal strength was the cause of your problem, you should see a significant improvement in operation.
(MDS = Minimum Discernable Signal)
Given that the received signal from the other device is quite high, you probably should not fit a dipole to the emonBase anyway. (@Bill.Thomson ?)
He’s got plenty of margin, so addng a dipole to both ends of the link should be OK.
As I understand it, signal levels as high as -30 0 dBm present no issues.
from post No.17.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect a 10 dB improvement, but if so, isn’t it in danger of overloading the front end?
The spec for max signal level is 0 dBm if memory serves, but I’ll look it up to be certain.
Max input is indeed 0 dBm.
MDS is -115 dBm.
My system is now working RF-wise, so thanks for everybody who helped. I now realize that putting my questions about data spikes into the same thread was a bad idea (really, I knew it was a bad idea, but I hoped for a quick resolution). Is it possible to split the bits about spikes in the data to another thread?
I believe the problem occurs as a result of NaN data, but I haven’t got to the bottom of it yet. (and apologies but the lack of comments in the code or overview documentation is one of the main things in slowing me down diagnosing the problem, IMHO)
Good Idea. I moved them to a new thread.
The link is just above post 19 in this thread.
Thanks, Bill.