NRF52832 BLE Certification under ETSI EN 300 328

[simao.pinheiro]

Hello,

My company recently developed a product based on your NRF52832. After some research and direct contact with some labs, we came to the conclusion that we have to test our product under the european directive EN 300 328. The lab that we are in contact with then asked us to fill annex E.2 from the directive.

www.etsi.org/.../en_300328v020101p.pdf

As we don't have an RF engineer on our team we are experiencing serious diffilcuties in doing just that. There are lots of information available but we don't seem to be able to find direct answers to the questions present in the form. Worse than that is the absurd amount of contradictory information that we bumped into.

With that being said, We kindly ask if you could help us with this matter, either by filling out the form or by work us through the document step by step.

Thanks in advance

[bjorn-spockeli]

Hi Andrzej,

A Bluetooth Low Energy device would have to fall under the category non-adaptive frequency hopping equipment as Bluetooth Low Energy does adapt to its radio environment by identifying channels that are being used and excluding them from the list of available channels. 

FCC requires minimum 15 channels(adaptive or not) and ETSI requires a minimum of 5 channels for non-adaptive FHSS equipment, see section below

4.3.1.4.3.1 Non-adaptive frequency hopping equipment

"The hopping sequence(s) shall contain at least N hopping frequencies where N is either 5 or the result of 15 MHz divided by the minimum Hopping Frequency Separation in MHz, whichever is the greater. According to clause 4.3.1.5.3.1 the minimum Hopping Frequency Separation for non-adaptive equipment is equal to the Occupied Channel Bandwidth with a minimum of 100 kHz."

 We certify all our Bluetooth Low Energy development kits and reference designs as a Digital Modulation System/ Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum devices. 

Best regards

Bjørn

[HugoCalliope]

Thanks a lot for providing this reference.
I am currently filling the form EN 300 328 2.2.2 for a NRF52833 SMD antenna board with Softdevice 113 and have some questions:

In the section E.2:

- e) the maximum RF Output Power (e.i.r.p.) is listed here as 4dBm, but the Radio Test firmware lets me choose values up to 8dBm. Is 4dBm still correct?

- f) the same as above.

-m) Our meandered inverted F antenna according to https://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra117d/swra117d.pdf. The anntena was matched by Nordic for 50Ohms, do you know which antenna gain I should assume? There are several mentioned relatively to the xy,xz,yz, plane.

I also face difficulties filling up the section E.3. I don't exactly know which combination leads to the highest overall e.i.r.p. value. Can you help?

Thank you a lot in advance,

Hugo