nRF52840 Coded Phy Range Problem

[Aamir]

Hi,

I am using nRF52840 Enineering C chip on a custom board using SDK v15.3.0 with SoftDevice v6.1.1

I have modified the Blinky Central code and the Blinky Peripheral code to work in Long Range mode using Coded Phy.

The receiver on the Central is ON 100% of the time, and the peripheral is advertising at 100 ms interval.

The Range results I got while changing the tx power of peripheral is as follows:

Coded Phy 8 dbm tx power - 250 meters

Coded phy 0 dbm tx power - 170 meters.

1MBps Phy 0 dbm tx power - ~100 meters

1MBps Phy 8 dbm tx power - 150 meters

This is way less than expected, how can the range be increased further ?

[Simonr]

Thanks for the clarification. Are you using one of our example projects when testing this? If not, could you try using one of our demos (Testing long range or nRF52840 long range demo) to test the range as well? You should also check out the links awneil posted to see if the environment you're testing it in could be victim to various interference sources. I'd also recommend trying to get your hands on a couple of DKs for testing, as that would be the easiest way to find out if it's the environment or the hardware that's the problem.

Best regards,

Simon

[Aamir]

I have basically modified the blinky examples of both the Central and Peripheral to test the range. (The code I posted above)

could there be a problem with my code, because as far as I understand, the changes I made to code to enable long range should give me similar results as your experiments, shouldn't it ?

yes, environment could be a factor for degradation in range and we are in talks to get our hands on the new DKs

but, that is only possible if we are confident that there is nothing wrong with the code.

So, please let me know if there could be any bottlenecks or limiting factor in the code, then we can move on to the hardware upgrade.