No BLE signal at the antenna on nRF52832 custom board.

[Daehyeon Kim]

Hi.

I'm struggling with BLE example projects on the my custom board.

my board uses nRF52832-QFAA, 16MHz external crystal with no 32,768kHz optional RTC.

and I choose SDK 15.1v, softdevice 6.1v as development environment.

I uploaded ble_app_uart, ble_app_templete project, both of projects BLE won't work

but the other functions (gpio, uart, app_timer) is working. 

first, my smartphone nordic uart app can't find this as bluetooth device. (not on the list)

and I checked antenna signal through the oscilloscope, there isn't any signal on the line.

so I guess it's not the problem on the hardware.

so, this is how is this board designed and it's almost same as nRF52832 reference design.

this chip antenna has already been verified in the my previous project using nRF51822.

do you have good idea for this?

[Eugene Yu]

Hello Mr.Kim,

You are using wrong external crystal frequency.

nRF52832 only supports 32MHz.

Please refer to below link.

• Clock - Clock control
• Reference Circuitry

Thanks,

Eugene

[Daehyeon Kim]

then now I should buy new crystal. I'll try your advice soon.

thank you!

[Jared]

Hi 

As mentioned in the comment from Eugene, the nRF52 only supports 32 MHz crystals. You should also change the capacitor that is connected to DEC 4 from 100 nF to 1.0 µF likewise the reference schematic that can be found here

Cheers

Jared