When I heard there was an upgraded antenna for Zigbee and Thread, I jumped on the first release, just as it was being announced. Nabu Casa typically offers quite good hardware to interface with Home Assistant, and my Philips Hue bridge was feeling sluggish and old. Thread was not living up to the hype, regardless of my 4 border routers (2 homepod mini, nanoleaf lines, & ZBT-1 Skyconnect). It was time to double down on Zigbee.
The physical size difference is comical between the ZBT-1 & -2, and follows the logic of throwing money at the problem until it’s solved. If we are going for best signal parameters, aim for the tuned wavelength, and a massive gain antenna.
Since each antenna operates as a separate protocol, we needed one to replace the ZBT-1 Thread, and a second to replace the Philips Hue bridge for Zigbee. I did look into combination units across the SMLIGHT & SONOFF product lineup, but I struggled to find a reason to stray from a Nabu Casa offering, to ensure tight Home Assistant compliance and support over time. SMLIGHT combination devices had interesting features, but they felt like experiments, and I was already annoyed at Thread reliability. Keeping local to the rack means USB to my Proxmox NUC is fine, and nothing exotic like POE decoupling is required, until I find a reason to build a HA cluster.
At first I was planning to spray the antennas black to blend in, but as they sit for a few months and collect dust, they fit in nicely with the rest of the rack hardware. They live on top to ensure best performance, as the rack would block much of the RF, even with the glass front. If anything, I need to tidy up my cable management for all this Ethernet.
For the Thread and Zigbee integration to Home Assistant, I chose to flash with ZHA & Open Thread Border Router. Sadly, my Thread door/window contact sensors seem no better with the ZBT-2 than ZBT-1, suffering random periods of outage. Same with PIR motion sensors. 2.4GHz ISM is quite busy, but I don’t see how it’s noisy enough that none of the border routers would catch the messages. I’ve been camping out on Channel 25, maybe its time to move.
For Zigbee, it was a night and day experience moving from Philips Hue to ZHA on ZBT-2. Everything is responsive now, and all of my hue bulbs change as requested. Before migration, many lights would be sticky and not change when instructed, leaving daily automations to be manually dealt with. This was a great upgrade. I didn’t feel the need to move to Z2M, past ZHA, at least with only Hue bulbs at the moment on Zigbee.
One of the more interesting comparisons between protocols I have found, is that I prefer Bluetooth. Thread feels endlessly immature vs Zigbee, although I appreciate the concept of multiple Border Routers for reliability. Running multiple Bluetooth proxies, across ESP32’s on ESP Home, and Shelly modules tucked away for energy monitoring, you get the benefit of multiple gateways. It becomes quite apparent how popular Bluetooth is, when you compare the map below (Bluetooth) to above (Zigbee). Everyone fighting for 2.4GHz
The 2.4GHz ISM band is crowded, and these competing standards don’t help. When you start to think about how far these signals transmit, and how many neighbors you have in a place like NYC, its quite amazing we can see the signal through the noise. The easiest of which, is legacy Wi-Fi, where many IoT devices still reside, the initial king of smart sensors. Here again we can find some level of redundancy, with Access Points splitting the same SSID, allowing hops between channels to find the best solution. All we need now, is a new standard to rule them all.
