did you use the fa rady to go sd-card-image or did you install anything from scratch. i’m wondering what happens here with ant73 and your pi-zero - as mine works like a charm up to 300 aircrafts and above running from the same sd-card i use in the pi2! what dongle do you use? did you try different usb cables to connect the dongle? i’m wondering if it could be possible that there is so much noise on other frequencies that the workload from usb-dongle increases so much that the zero is not able to compute all incoming data …
this was my setup for test above - but i used the standard lightblue nooelec dongle connected to the splitter