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PCA20035 Antenna Tuning RF Switches

Hello,

I'm looking for a little clarification on how the antenna tuning circuitry works on the Thingy:91 v1.0.0 board.

From a previous topic on the DevZone, I saw that one user was able to get the GPS on the PCA20035 board working by removing the XMAGPIO command from the GPS sample application.
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/f/nordic-q-a/50457/thingy-91/201867#201867

I now have my own Thingy:91 and want to be able to configure it for B20 LTE and then GPS. From the board-nonsecure.c file in the device tree I can see that the following AT command is flashed with my firmware to the device.

#define AT_CMD_MAGPIO		"AT%XMAGPIO=1,1,1,450,451,746,803,698,748," \
				"824,894,880,960,1710,2200,791,849,1574,1577"

This then shows up in the post-boot COM port information:

SPM: NS image at 0xc000                                                                                                                                                            
SPM: NS MSP at 0x20024ac8                                                                                                                                                          
SPM: NS reset vector at 0x1517d                                                                                                                                                    
SPM: prepare to jump to Non-Secure image.                                                                                                                                          
***** Booting Zephyr OS v1.14.99-ncs2 *****                                                                                                                                        
[00:00:00.287,994] <dbg> board_nonsecure.leds_init: LEDs initialized                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                                                                   
[00:00:00.301,422] <dbg> board_nonsecure.pca20035_magpio_configure: AT CMD: AT%XMAGPIO=1,1,1,450,451,746,803,698,748,824,894,880,960,1710,2200,791,849,1574,1577                   
[00:00:00.316,101] <dbg> board_nonsecure.pca20035_magpio_configure: AT RESP: OK                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                                                   
[00:00:00.323,425] <dbg> board_nonsecure.pca20035_magpio_configure: MAGPIO successfully configured                                                                                 
Application Started                                                                                                                                                                
Starting up into NB-IoT mode                                                                                                                                                       
Opening AT Command Socket     

From the Info center, I can see that the Antenna Tuning on the PCA20035 is controlled by 3 RF Switches that are connected to the MAGPIOs and each 3 bit combination (from 000-111) is used for different LTE bands with 111 being GPS. From that I would assume that what I actually need is MAGPIO configuration "1,0,1,791,849" for LTE and "1,1,1,1574,1577" for GPS. However, the start-up seems to just pile them all in together as one big command.

Is that the correct way to utilise the MAGPIOs on the PCA20035 or do they actually need to be properly configured for each operation (LTE or GPS).

  • Hi Andreas,

    The rain held off long enough to get a fix after ~115 seconds (it is now pouring down). Thanks for the help getting the GPS tuning correct.

    I have noticed that the "Using:" section of the satelite stats now seems to be accurately reporting how many satelites the device is using from the ones tracked. Is this a new feature of the 1.0.1 modem firmware?

    I can't remember ever seeing this field of the print_satellite_stats() function ever working in the past with the PCA10090 board and the firmware I'm using is a stripped down version of a larger application I'm building for a custom nRF91 board.

  • Hi,

      

    MJD093 said:
    I have noticed that the "Using:" section of the satelite stats now seems to be accurately reporting how many satelites the device is using from the ones tracked. Is this a new feature of the 1.0.1 modem firmware?

    Yes, it seems there was a small fix to this with the 1.0.1 release.

     

    Best regards,

    Andreas 

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