Testing BT5 long range

[Davide]

Hello, I'm testing the capability of BT5 so I bought two nRF52840 Preview DK (I also have one nRF52832 DK) and I have some questions that may speed up the work.

1. I'm interested in the long range feature, in particular advertising mode and periodic broadcast. Is this supported in the last SDK release? Can I expect to make it work?

2. does the nRF Connect windows application (version 1.1.1) support the long range (in particular scanning) if I give to it a nRF52840 Preview DK connected through USB?

3. does the SoftDevice s140 5.0.0-2alpha support the periodic broadcast reception?

If all the answers are positive I'll go on, otherwise probably I have to wait some software release.

thank you, Davide

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi Davide,

1. The latest release S140 v5.0.0 3.alpha support advertising over long range. This requires Advertising Extensions PDUs (legacy advertising on LE coded PHY is not allowed), but the implementation is limited to 31 octets payload. Full Advertising Extentions and Periodic Advertising is not supported yet. See the release notes and migration guide of the S140 v5.0.0 3.alpha download, and this thread for more details.
2. nRF Connect currently only work with S132 softdevice (softdevice API version 3). The source code is available on out GitHub, so it is possible to extend it to work with S140 softdevice and long-range, but we do not support this at the moment.
3. No, this is not supported by our softdevices yet. It is supported by the hardware on both nRF52832 and nRF52840, and we are working on adding support in the softdevices as well.

Best regards,

Jørgen