We are finishing up development of our product and looking into creating our Bluetooth listing. We are using the NRF52840 SoC (Fanstel BT840F model) with softdevice and NRF Connect SDK for development.
As far as I understand it, since Nordic (or zephyr) hasn't certified the profile subsystems for services such as BAS and DIS that we use, our certification will require testing. According to documentation from Nordic on bluetooth certification we should be able to run these tests using the PTS tool ourselves and be done with it.
However when creating our listing in the Bluetooth SIG portal, we are forced to add the RF PHY and LL layers among others to the ICS because of the consistency check. After doing this and downloading the testing specification, the tests for LL and RF PHY are in Category A, which requires a certified test house to perform in order to meet the qualification requirements.
I would assume that since the NRF52840 & SoftDevice controller already is certified that we only need to perform tests that are not covered by the previous certification that already exists. However this doesn't seem to be the case. I cannot add the QDIDs from Nordic at the start of the listing since they are qualified as subsystems and not components.
Are we missing something here? Do we need to go to a test house or can we do it ourselves?
It seems like we shouldn't have to redo the RF PHY and LL testing if that's already been done by Nordic for these designs. In that case, what is the point of using a pre-qualified device if we still need to retest everything?
