Long range advertisement with nRF52840

RE: Long range advertisement with nRF52840

Simonr — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 13:46:07 GMT

The example in the blog does use buttons on the DK to switch between advertising modes, etc. so you'll have to add some buttons to the module, or edit the application to work around this in some way. Other than that, there shouldn't be any problems running the project on the blog as far as I know.

Best regards,

Simon

PS: The Holiday season is upon us, which will leave the Nordic support team understaffed until January 6th, 2020. This means that delayed replies will occur during this time. Sorry about the inconvenience and happy Holidays!

RE: Long range advertisement with nRF52840

OpenCircuit — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 12:51:20 GMT

Thank you Simonr, I will follow the instructions on that blog. However, 3 PCA10056 DK are used in this blog. I have only one DK and 2 BT840 modules. Can I still achieve this long range test ? I just want to be sure.

RE: Long range advertisement with nRF52840

Simonr — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 08:26:47 GMT

1. Yes, it should be possible to transmit and receive using Coded PHY with these modules. I don't know if the antennas on these modules are well suited for this, but I assume you will be able to achieve a lot more than 50m in any case. You can check out this blog post on how you can test long-range in your with two nRF52840 devices.

2. Again, this should be very well explained in the blog post I linked to. The cornerstones to enable long-range is that the advertising PHY must be set to BLE_GAP_PHY_CODED, the advertising type must be set to one of the BLE_GAP_ADV_TYPE_EXTENDED modes defined in ble_gap.h, and the advertising flags must be set to BLE_GAP_ADV_FLAGS_LE_ONLY_GENERAL_DISC_MODE.

3. You set the PHY in the advertising parameters in adv_params.primary_phy to the desired PHY.

4. You can use the example in the aforementioned blog post or the BLE long-range demo on our GitHub.

5. No, the nRF52840 does not support BLE 5.1. We do have chips supporting BLE 5.1 though, these include nRF52811, nRF52833, and nRF5340.

Best regards,

Simon