Does BLE Mesh Long Range (coded PHY) beacon seen on phone supporting Bluetooth 4.2?

[Shubham]

I have made changes from here in order to configure data rate at Coded PHY for mesh application.

Tested with two phones:
    Moto G5 Plus (Bluetooth 4.2)
    OnePlus 6 (Bluetooth 5, supports Coded PHY, verified using nRF Connect)

Observations:
    I could see the beacon on both phones (this confused me)
    I was able to provision device using both phones and send messages to device.

Is is expected behaviour? Does BLE Mesh beacon with Coded PHY data rate should be seen on blueooth 4.2 enabled phone?

Or am I doing something wrong. I am using a custom application not from SDK examples.

Thanks.

[Simonr]

Hi

This is because the modifications made by my colleague is made to the Mesh ADV bearer and not the GATT bearer, which is what the phone uses to provision. Remember, a phone isn't supposed to be able to talk to a mesh node unless it has a proxy node that lets it join the network. So the phones still communicate using the GATT bearer, which is using Bluetooth 4.2, while the ADV bearers (mesh nodes) talking to each other communicates using Coded PHY.

Best regards,

Simon

[Shubham]

Thanks Simon.

I'll look into how to use Coded PHY on GATT bearer. Do you guys have any guidelines for it.

Also, If I run a sniffer, will it be able to tell the PHY in use between
    1. mesh nodes
    2. mesh node and mobile

-Shubhbam

[Simonr]

Hi

To configure Coded PHY on the GATT bearer you'll have to modify the proxy file. You should be able to follow what we have in the long-range example in the nRF5 SDK. Please note that not too many phones support Coded PHY as of yet, so I don't know how useful this will be.

Best regards,

Simon

[Shubham]

Thanks a lot.