Bluetooth 5 Long Range to Mobile Devices

[xhr0428]

I have a few Bluetooth transmitters based on nRF52832. My receiver devices are mainly iOS and Android mobile devices. I'm considering of replacing them with nRF52840 for Bluetooth 5 long range feature. As far as I know, I could set higher TX power and use coded PHY on nRF52840 DK to get longer range.

For higher TX power, I used sd_ble_gap_tx_power_set(BLE_GAP_TX_POWER_ROLE_ADV, m_advertising.adv_handle, 8) after advertising_init() and sd_ble_gap_tx_power_set(BLE_GAP_TX_POWER_ROLE_ADV, m_conn_handle, 8) after BLE_GAP_EVT_CONNECTED. Is this the right implementation? I was using SDK12.3 for nRF52832 and tx_power_set didn't take these many parameters. 

For coded PHY, I added

 

m_advertising.adv_params.primary_phy = BLE_GAP_PHY_CODED;
m_advertising.adv_params.secondary_phy = BLE_GAP_PHY_CODED;

in advertising_init(). Then I realized many of my targeted receiving devices only support up to BLE4.2 or don't support coded PHY even though they claim to be BLE5.0 compatible. So in this case, would using coded PHY only on the transmitter side still help transmission range? 

Thanks

[awneil]

xhr0428 said:

don't support coded PHY even though they claim to be BLE5.0 compatible

This is perfectly valid - because of the way the Bluetooth SIG have defined the criteria to be  "BLE5.0 compatible".

See: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/33060/is-there-any-smartphone-with-supporting-of-bluetooth-5-long-range-feature/157599#157599

xhr0428 said:

I was using SDK12.3 for nRF52832 and tx_power_set didn't take these many parameters

See: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/37928/just-set-tx-power/146239#146239

xhr0428 said:

would using coded PHY only on the transmitter side still help transmission range? 

No: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/24859/bluetooth-5-long-range/97908#97908