Never heard back from HAI on this question of what causes the RSSI to drop to 0 for all my wireless sensors, but it is still happening. Unfortunately it still happens regularly and causes so much to be spewed to my logs that I had to turn off the additional logging of RSSI values.
Which is unfortunate because..
I had another false alarm occur 10 days ago on a wireless zone. I'm not sure precisely what happened but here's what I know:
- System was armed in AWAY mode
- A wireless zone reported NOT READY triggering a BURGLARY alarm
- System dialed out and informed the central station
- System was not accepting TCP or UDP connections (via digitaldan's iPhone H@me app or PC Access)
- System did accept phone calls (though it was inconsistent. Required several attempts before the HAI would answer the call)
Unfortunately I was out of town so I could not check on the system in person until nearly 24 hours later. The central station dispatched the police, who came and examined the zone in question (garage window) and confirmed it was OK (not tampered with, not open) and chalked the incident up to "unknown cause".
I sent my petsitter to the house the next day, and she disarmed the system. She armed it in AWAY mode after checking on the house and our pets. After she left, I was able to access the system remotely via H@me and PC Access (both TCP and UDP worked just fine). I saw that some of my wireless zones were reporting RSSI values of 0 in PC Access. At this time, I reenabled the existing lines of programming to record the RSSI signal strength for all my wireless zones.
After coming home, I conducted a thorough examination of the zone in question and can't find any reason for the alarm. The magnet and wireless sensor are aligned, there was no evidence of any tampering or 'give' in the window, and the rest of the house checked out OK. The signal strength for the zone has always been a rock-solid 3 (the wireless receiver is less than 10 ft from the sensor, almost directly above in the attic) but per PC Access was 0 reception ~16 hrs after the incident.
At a minimum this looks like a HAI Wireless sensor false alarm, but there hasn't been anything in the operating history of this zone that would have presaged this. I certainly hope there is no fundamental reliability issue with the HAI Wireless system. I'd also like to understand why I couldn't remotely connect to the system. I have to say this was very disconcerting, as when I'm away from home I rely on being able to get remote access to the system to be able to figure out what's going on.
Unfortunately I'm still waiting for HAI support to respond, and confirm whether I've tripped over a known issue. I'd also love to hear that the issue of the RSSI values dropping to 0 has been addressed so I'd have better logging of the signal strength for my wireless zones.
Are folks here having better luck w/ the GE Wireless sensors? Though it would be expensive to have to change them out, if I can't get a reliable HAI Wireless solution in place I may have to start looking at that option.
