Understanding of hardware around of 52833 and 5340 required for direction finding implementation

[Pret]

Hello

We're a startup company focusing on innovative smart home and security technology solutions, evaluating our way into beacon/locator design to support BLT 5.1 capabilities, in particular, direction-finding

I realize there are three nRF chips currently available to support both AoA and AoD: 52820, 52833 and 5340

Few questions I'd appreciate to get clarified:

1. Do these devices include an internal antenna switcher or the RF switch shall be implemented separately on the PCB and controlled by the aforementioned devices (through GPIO's ?)

2. There were multiple threads here in the forum asking for the direction-finding support from 52833/5340 hardware DK/SDK demo, but those questions were in quite far past (a year ago and farther). So trying again - does Nordic have now probably support for such demo in the current hardware DK and SDK for these devices?

3. If neither of 52833/5340 has an integrated RF switch, what are recommended parts to accomplish that task?

4. Does the direction-finding require more frequent transmitting cycles for beacon in the case of AoA than it would be without the direction-finding? (i.e. for instance, without direction-finding  - using long intervals of 0.5-1sec to preserve battery) ? Are we constrained by the 5.1 prescribing minimum allowable CTE transmission sessions per second? Or this is only limited by the required application performance as a locator?

Thank you

Alex

[Simonr]

Hi

1. If you're only doing AoA calculation and receiving, the nRF52833 should be more than sufficient to do that. If you're planning on doing a lot of other operations in your application you might want to move to the nRF5340, but that's up to you and the scope of your project.

2. If the APP-core is in an idle state and does not retain RAM (which is what generally draws power in IDLE mode). If the radio is the only thing that will draw power in your beacon application, the nRF53 sould use less current consumption than the nRF52833, as the radio is more efficient in nRF53 than the nRF52833.

Best regards,

Simon

[Pret]

Thank you very much, Simon, that clarifies

Recently I was listening to the Quuppa podcast where they mentioned they use 52840 and 52832 in their tags that support direction finding (for AoA).

They do have support for BLE 5.1 direction finding as well as their own proprietary direction approach.

As far as I realize, neither 52840 nor 52832 support direction finding... how is that possible that Quuppa still manages to do that with these chips with both, BLE 5.1 and their proprietary approaches ?

Thank you

Alex