Differences in Bluetooth receiving power

[ranran]

Hi everyone, I noticed something unusual while testing BLE transmission and reception:

• Transmitter: nRF5340DK

• Receiver setups tested:

  1. config：Target board = nRF5340, board：5340DK configured as receiver → throughput < 100 kbps

  2. config：Target board = nRF5340, board：7002DK configured as receiver → throughput < 100 kbps

  3. config：Target board = nRF21540DK , board：21540DK configured as receiver → throughput reaches ~1000 kbps

So, with the same transmitter (5340DK), only the nRF21540 setup achieves significantly higher BLE throughput. Both other setups remain below 100 kbps.

Could this be due to the RF front-end (PA/LNA) difference, or is it related to SDK configuration / BLE stack parameters? Has anyone encountered a similar situation?

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

In what environment are you testing, and with what Tx power and distance between the devices? If testing in short proximitey with normal Tx power, I would not expect to see a difference with or wihtout the nRF21540DK. So I would look into the configuration to see if the difference.

Are you building the same project for the three compbinations? If so, are there any board specific overlay files with different configurations? If not, we need to look at the default configurations of the board. Perhaps you can share the project you are testing, as well as the generated .config for all variants so that we can see which combinations are actually used?

You can have a look at the second half of the configuration paramters in the prj.conf of the throuhgput sample to see important configs that affect throughput.