@ WhiteHare, in general, what kind of usable range do you experience using the SMD resistor for an antenna?
I'm curious to learn how the RSSI level compares to the wire antenna at various distances.
I have all of my Moteinos in use at the moment or I would try it my self.
I'll give you the range in my house, but it wouldn't necessarily translate to yours. That's why I expressed it as the amount of RSSI impairment, which should be about the same, and which you could interpret for your own environment.
That said, I live in two story, roughly 4,000 sf house made using commonplace wood stick construction. If I put a regular moteino gateway with quarter wave antenna in a corner of the lower floor and I then put the impaired node (i.e. the one running the dummy load resistive antenna pictured above) in the opposite diagonal corner on the second story (which I assume to be a worst case scenario, or close to it), I do receive packets, but with a lot of losses. I suspect I could improve or worsen that by how I orientate the node, but that's what I got just from plunking it down without any thought. Also, those results are from running Felix's generic gateway and node sketches. If I were to change the firmware to use a lower OTA bitrate and narrower bandwidth, and/or possibly increase the transmit power (I'm forgetting now what Felix chose as the default power Tx level), I'm sure it would do better. Even as is, though, it's doing far better than an NRF24L01+ module would. To be honest, I didn't expect it would do anywhere near as well as it is.
[Edit: In terms of receiving packets from the next room through a wall or something like that, it's definitely no challenge for it. ]