As I mentioned in another post, I am trying a new UPB installation in my house. I have a PCS split-phase repeater installed, and am trying an installation of about 15 devices before I put in a bunch more.
I ran into some issues that looked noise related (mentioned in this post) that I suspected might be related to the repeater. I could never get totally reliable communications, but things seemed to be better when the repeater was disabled.
I recently tried installing a number of SA UPB filters on know problems areas in my house for PLC communications (surge protectors, UPS's, outlets with a preponderance of electronics on them). This improved things quite a bit, but I was still having issues with some devices occasionally not being reachable by UPStart.
I went through the circuit breakers in the panel, turning off circuits one by one to try to isolate potential noise sources that I may not have filtered, with no different results, unfortunately. I then went to UPStart and decided to turn off the "Automatically make use of it" option for the phase repeater, and change it to "Never make use of it" instead. Before I had put filters in, this improved things a bit, but never got everything working consistently.
Lo and behold, now all the devices seem to be reachable by UPStart! However, communication tests show that some devices have a low signal strength. Repeated tests show single digit (as low as 4 or 5 in one case) signal strengths at some devices, while other devices show average signal strengths over 80. The split-phase repeater shows a signal strength of over 130!
So, my questions are:
I'm getting the impression this active phase repeater is really more trouble than it's worth for this installation. Perhaps I would be better off with a passive coupler like a Simply Automated SA-ZPCI-W to just improve the signal strength across the phases a bit.
Any thoughts?
I ran into some issues that looked noise related (mentioned in this post) that I suspected might be related to the repeater. I could never get totally reliable communications, but things seemed to be better when the repeater was disabled.
I recently tried installing a number of SA UPB filters on know problems areas in my house for PLC communications (surge protectors, UPS's, outlets with a preponderance of electronics on them). This improved things quite a bit, but I was still having issues with some devices occasionally not being reachable by UPStart.
I went through the circuit breakers in the panel, turning off circuits one by one to try to isolate potential noise sources that I may not have filtered, with no different results, unfortunately. I then went to UPStart and decided to turn off the "Automatically make use of it" option for the phase repeater, and change it to "Never make use of it" instead. Before I had put filters in, this improved things a bit, but never got everything working consistently.
Lo and behold, now all the devices seem to be reachable by UPStart! However, communication tests show that some devices have a low signal strength. Repeated tests show single digit (as low as 4 or 5 in one case) signal strengths at some devices, while other devices show average signal strengths over 80. The split-phase repeater shows a signal strength of over 130!
So, my questions are:
- Why would telling UPStart to use the PCS SPR cause it to be unable to reach sime devices, but when it doesn't use the repeater it can reach those devices? Is the repeater defective? Do I need to do some sort of special configuration of it? Changing its receive sensitivity from HI to LOW does not improve things.
- I assume the low signal strength of 4 or 5 for some devices is a problem. However, none of the UPStart communications tests shows any noise registering (at least right now). Does it seem reasonable to run with some devices having this low of a signal strength?
I'm getting the impression this active phase repeater is really more trouble than it's worth for this installation. Perhaps I would be better off with a passive coupler like a Simply Automated SA-ZPCI-W to just improve the signal strength across the phases a bit.
Any thoughts?
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