"Tile Pro" Tracker - Impressive Range

[jumpingfool]

I have recently purchased the newly released "Tile Pro" bluetooth tracker after noticing a number of reviews online were giving good reports in terms of the BLE range.

The device is using the TC35678 from TI connected to an RF amplifier that I've been unable to identify marked X8 OZ4D. It also has a pretty funky looking PCB antenna - you can see it in the FCC report here:

fccid.io/.../Internal-Photos-3495407

They claim battery life of 1 year on a CR2032.

Under test the line of sight range from this device is nearly double that I can achieve from the NRF52 DK. Is this a function of the amplifier, the antenna design or potentially both?

If I move my design to the 52840 with +8db output can I reasonably expect to achieve similar performance in terms of range and battery life, or will an RF amplifier need to be incorporated into the design in order to achieve this?

[jumpingfool]

Thanks to Torbjorn and endnode for their help with my question.

Just in case anyone else is looking to try out the skyworks power amplifier recommended by Torbjorn I can highly recommend this dev kit from notwired:

www.notwired.co/.../

Not only do they provide a reference design containing the NRF52832 and the Skyworks SKY66112-11 on a tiny board, they also provide example code showing how to interface the two using the Nordic SDK, which can then easily be translated to other applications. Using this I was up an running with my own application in just a couple of hours.

The radio module also has a handy set of 1.27mm headers (male and female) down each side that make it easy to incorporate the module into other designs - it's like a miniature PCA10040 dev board.

The range from the module with the PA set to high power is very impressive, adding around another 10 meters onto the (already impressive) range of Tile's TC35678 based design.

Fantastic!

[ovrebekk]

Hi

Thanks for the information on the notwired solution. Good to hear that you found something that worked satisfactorily :)

Best regards