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]

I don't think there are, because I can't think of what should be the limiting factor in the code, but to confirm it for sure, you should test one of the long-range demos on the boards you have (in the same environment), to see if you're able to achieve a similar range.

Best regards,

Simon

[Aamir]

Hi Simonr,

I've tested the long-range demo code today, what I got was a slight improvement over my code. This test was done in the same environment as my original test.

Tx Power: 8 dbm   PHY: Coded PHY

My Code: ~270 meters

Long Range demo code: ~320 meters 

So, there was an improvement but not by any significant margin and I think this improvement should mainly be attributed to the advertising interval, as in the long range code, the advertising interval is 50 ms whereas in my code the minimum I've tested was 100 ms.