Thank you both for the info. I rearranged the antenna to be normal to the PCB (I assume that is the ground plane.?? Forgive me, I only have 1/3 of an EE degree) The RSSI as returned by getRSSI are still in the -70s when the radio is quiet.
The only connections are GND->GND, TXD->RXD, RXD->TXD, 3.3->3.3. Should I throw a decoupling cap across the 3.3 and the GND?
I would love to actually make a small permanent shield that accepts a moteino and lets it sit on the RPI along with a small OLED display so would be nice to deal with the problem in hardware.
Just to clarify, the RSSIs reported in that screencap are in fact from the readRSSI() call as of a git pull from a few weeks ago, and at the time I ran the test, I had previously read the code from that checkout to confirm that the function call was in fact returning RSSI values newly requested from the RFM. The code was:
if( millis() - lastUpdate > 1000 )
{
Serial.print( "D: Moteino Gateway Up millis:[" );
Serial.print( millis() );
Serial.print( "] RSSI:[" );
Serial.print( radio.readRSSI() );
Serial.print( "]" );
Serial.print( "filename [" );
Serial.print( __FILE__ );
Serial.println("]");
lastUpdate = millis();
}
I have done a fresh git checkout and will try a modification that allows for RSSI thresholds to be overridden.