BLE Long Range Communication with Mobile Phones

[Bartosz22]

I have a question: Is it possible to use BLE Long Range mode (Coded PHY) in the NRF52840 with mobile phones? If not, is there a solution to use it in parallel with normal mode, so I can use BLE Long Range to communicate with some devices while still connecting to a mobile phone?

[Priyanka]

Hi Bartosz,

It is possible to use the BLE Long Range (Coded PH) in the nRF52840 with mobile phones, but the mobile phone should also support long range. If not, the mobile phone cannot search for devices that support/use the long range function.

Please take a look at this discussion, which may be of help. :)

Regards,

Priyanka

[Bartosz22]

Thanks for quick reply, but how about communication efficiency when for example for the primary phy I will choose 1MBS and secondary coded phy ? What will be the impact on the communication ? 

[Priyanka]

You can take a look at this ticket where a colleague of mine mentions that using Coded PHY mode will use the same 1Mbps modulation to send data, just using more redundancy bit for error correction to achieve longer range.

i.e. basically there is an increased power consumption and a compromise with throughput too.

-Priyanka

[Bartosz22]

I have one more question is it possible to use 1M on primary phy and Coded PHY on secondary phy in advertising mode ? Cause in latest zephyr I saw that when configuring advertising mode and selecting Coded PHY it will be selected for both primary and secondary phy. 

[Priyanka]

Hi Bartosz,

Technically this should be possible, but as you mentioned , the latest zephyr does not seem to support setting different PHYs for primary and secondary channels. 

In BLE5.0  and later on, you can actually use different PHYs for primary and secondary channels, but this configuration depends on the specific implementation of the Bluetooth stack you are using, or in other words, you will require explicit support from the stack. 

If you require this feature, then I suggest you should try using a different stack version or maybe wait for updates to Zephyr which may contain new APIs or configuration options.

Hope this helps with your doubts. If the initial topic for the ticket has been answered, I would suggest you to create a new ticket for further different topics, because this would help keep devzone clean and also help future seekers to obtain answers based on topics easily.

Regards,

Priyanka