Arrival sensor, what is range to hub?

I have an arrival sensor, and also my iPhone setup. I lend my arrival sensor in my car. However it sometimes doesn’t register arrived/left as the car is parked out the back of my house in a cul-de-sac. The iPhone works fine as it’s in my pocket.

Is there a max range that the arrival sensor had to see the hub? If so it means I can’t leave the arrival sensor in my car permanently which is ideally what I wanted to do. e.g. my plan was if my iPhone was at home, arrival sensor left home, send alert as I’d know the car had left (one example).

Thanks

Check here for info on the phones and presence sensor ranges:

These sensors uses a very low powered radio in order to conserve battery life. The down side is that this can cause issues with seeing the hub, especially if it’s not line of site.

If you can get a Zigbee repeating device closer to where the car sits you can generally get very good solid connection.

For example, my hub was approx. 25-30 feet from my non-connected garage and my cars would do the leave-arrive dance regularly. But this was through two exterior walls and there was a lot of other electronic noise in the immediate area.

I’ve done four things to vastly improve my sensors performance and since then EXTREMELY rarely will I have any connection problems. Obviously your experience may be different, but just sharing what worked for me:

1.) Moved the hub away from my WiFi router. Because Zigbee and WiFi use the same frequency there may be some interference if the two devices are right close to each other. Even separating by a few feet can help.

2.) Put a SmartSense outlet in the Garage. This acts as a Zigbee repeater so when the cars are in the garage the outlet sees the signals and using it’s much stronger radio can easily communicate with the hub.

3.) Put a SmartSense Motion Sensor V1 motion sensor in a window facing the street. When plugged in the V1 motion sensor also acts as a repeater. After doing this my hub would regularly see my car when it’s 5 or 6 houses down the street vs. previously not until I was in the driveway.

4.) Attached the sensor to the inside of my windshield. I figured if it was in the window there’s less interference with the radio signal vs. sitting in the glove box or cup holder. Just a little bit of 3M command strip at the very top of the windshield behind the rear view mirror works great and doesn’t interfere with vision the road at all.

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