RE: RSSI Measurement

baughj — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:38:48 GMT

Mohammad,

Thank you for your suggestion! I started with the samples/bluetooth/rssi_power_control sample project as you mentioned. That was a good foundation to get me to what I wanted. AI helped me implement the GATT notify characteristic, and now I have it working as intended. I can see RSSI pairs for each direction of the link streaming out of the central.

Regards,

James

RE: RSSI Measurement

Mohammad Afaneh — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:32:31 GMT

Hi James,

Path Loss Monitoring will not fit here. It only fires events on zone transitions (Low / Middle / High), not continuous values, so it cannot give you the per-packet RSSI pair you want.

The primitive you actually want is HCI_Read_RSSI on the live bt_conn handle. Both ends of a connection can call it, so the Central reads RSSI of packets from the Peripheral and the Peripheral reads RSSI of packets from the Central. Poll it on a work queue at whatever cadence you need.

The samples/bluetooth/rssi_power_control sample (NCS v3.2.0+) is the closest existing reference for the Central-side polling pattern. Its actual purpose is automated TX power control, so you would take the RSSI-polling skeleton and drop the power-control loop.

For your bidirectional setup you also need the same polling on the Peripheral side and a small custom GATT notify characteristic for the back-channel. The Peripheral notifies its own RSSI to the Central; the Central reads its own RSSI on each notification and prints the pair over UART.

Hope this helps!

Mohammad
Novel Bits
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