nRF Sniffer Capability for Recognizing Extended Advertising PDUs

[mlyonupdesigns]

I am using the nRF SDK v15.3.0 example project ble_app_rscs on a PCA10040 development board. I am trying to determine the functionality I need to port to my pre-production product to utilize extended advertising. When I set init.config.ble_adv_extended_enabled to false, both my iPhone X and nRF sniffer (v2.0) are able to see the advertising PDUs. When I set init.config.ble_adv_extended_enabled to true I cannot see the advertising PDUs with either.

Does Nordic have a version of nRF sniffer that can recognize the extended advertising PDUs?

Does Nordic have a list of current mobile devices that can recognize the extended advertising PDUs?

Is there a suggested means to verify my implementation?

Mark

[Simonr]

Hi

The nRF Sniffer does not support Extended advertising I'm afraid. You may be able to see the initial ADV_EXT_IND packet, but not the actual extended packets that follow. This is because the sniffer only scans the three primary advertising channels (37, 38, and 39) while the extended advertising operations are done in secondary channels. 

We do not have an extensive list of what phones support extended advertising either, but most of the flagship models for each brand from 2019 and onwards (at least) have implemented support for this. Older phones and lower-end models generally don't though, but we're seeing more and more phones coming with this feature.

As far as I know, the only sniffer supporting BLE extended advertisement sniffing as of now is the Ellisys Bluetooth sniffers that can be used to sniff extended advertising packets. You can check out this case, where my colleague Stian has uploaded a snippet of how the advertising initialization should look in order to use extended advertising.

Best regards,

Simon

[mlyonupdesigns]

Thanks for the info. You can close the ticket.