range test

RE: range test

ovrebekk — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:56:12 GMT

1000 meters is quite impressive, but if they have a PA on the board I am sure it's possible :)

Because of the PA it's hard to predict the range at the different power settings, but if you do some experimentation you can probably find an estimate. If you are unlucky the PA will compensate for a lower output power of the nRF24L01+ by turning up the gain, which would reduce the impact of changing the TX output power (compared to using the nRF24L01+ without a PA).

RE: range test

mogplus8 — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 05:27:43 GMT

Thanks for the quick reply. The board does have the NRF24l01+ chip according to the description on Banggood.com, so that's good. Reducing by a factor of 8 is useful. That would indicate that, if it's still working 40m away in "low power" mode, it should work 320m away in normal power mode. The range is claimed to be up to 1000m, but realistically, for my application, 320m should be more than enough. I rarely fly more than about 200m away anyway, because the plane gets too hard to see if it's too far away! Thanks, Ian

RE: range test

ovrebekk — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 08:15:24 GMT

First off you should double check if you have the nRF24L01, or the newer nRF24L01+/nRF24L01p Most modules today should use the newer chip (both chips were released about 10 years back).

Both devices have the following output power settings: 0dBm, -6dBm, -12dBm and -18dBm

Each reduction of the output power by 6dB should reduce the range by a factor of 2. In other words, going from 0dBm to -18dBm should reduce the range by a factor of 8 (approximately).

To change the output power you should write to bits 1 and 2 in the RF_SETUP register (for more details, refer to the nRF24L01+ datasheet).

Reducing the supply voltage will not affect range, it will simply stop working if you go below the allowed supply range ;)