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Increase bluetooth range in a custom NRF52832 QFAA breakout board

alan1210

Hello,

I'm making a breakout board with nrf52832 qfaa. I used chip antenna (2450AT18B100E) and followed Nordic reference layout. I am getting around 60m range in an open environment (tested in a park).

Can you suggest any options in antennas (can be bigger than 2450AT18B100E or a pcb antenna) or any improvement in the existing circuit to increase the range upto 150m. I want to keep the pcb size as small as possible.

Note:
During range testing, the circuit is enclosed in 1.2mm thick small plastic box with a lipo battery on the bottom side of the pcb. Supply voltage VDD_nrf is 2.8V. This pcb only needs to send the battery voltage level to the bluetooth app (nrf Toolbox).
Pcb is 0.8mm thick FR4 board. Current board size is 20.5 x 21mm.








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  • 0

    Hello,

    Have anyone reviewed your design or helped you tune your antenna on the final PCB? If not, this is something we can help you with, but then you should open a private devzone ticket.

    In general antennas are passive components, and typically you want the antenna to be relatively omnidirectional to ensure that it can communicate and perform the same independant of how you orientate the board. If you use an directional antenna you can get more range, but only in specific directions. So typically using a different antenna may not help in terms of range, but you should make sure it's optimized by tuning. Increasing output power is typically the easiest way to increase range.

    Best regards,
    Kenneth

  • 0 in reply to Kenneth

    Hi Kenneth,

    Thanks for getting back on this. I haven't yet tuned the antenna on this PCB, I'll open a private ticket for that.
    For antenna implementation on this pcb, i followed the layout, orientation, clearances etc from nrfThingy52 layout as it also uses the same antenna.

    Can you tell me the maximum range of nrfThingy52, I couldn't find it anywhere online.

    Thanks.

  • 0 in reply to alan1210
    alan1210 said:
    Can you tell me the maximum range of nrfThingy52, I couldn't find it anywhere online.

    Sorry, we have not measured it, in general range depends so much on the environment that giving any number is misleading. If you have one you can always try range in the same setup for comparison.

    Kenneth

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