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I'm trying to use a WiPy board as a BLE scanner and we're detecting some extrange behaviours on radius Network Dot beacons.

We are trying with several beacon manufacturers, all emiting as iBeacon with an advertising interval of 100ms (10 per second). In the board we detected every second at least 4-5 advertising packets of this beacons, but most of the times 0 or 1 of the radius beacon dot.

We've tried with both altBeacon or iBeacon configuration and the results are similar. This is a screenshot of the configuration with the RadBeacon app: enter image description here

Are we configuring something wrong or are the beacons having an unexpected behaviour?

Eylen
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1 Answers1

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Not 100% of advertising packets send out by a Bluetooth LE device will be detected by receiving devices. The actual percentage received depends on a number of factors including:

  • Transmitter power level
  • Distance between the two devices
  • Radio noise in the area
  • Bluetooth radio congestion
  • Antennas on both transmitter and receiver
  • Orientation of antennas

Under good conditions (close range, high transmitter power), I typically see 80-90% of packets get detected by Android and iOS devices which allow you to easily count individual BLE packets.

Since your detection rate is much lower, you may want to try a number of things:

  • Increase your transmitter power level from -18 dBm to 3 dBm. Having the weakest power output configured is the most likely cause of your issue.
  • Bring your transmitter and receiver closer together.

If the above two suggestions don't help, I would use an independent tool such as an Android phone to actually count the number of BLE packets detected. I have an bare-bones app you can run on Android to do this here, but you'll need a copy of Android Studio to build and run it.

davidgyoung
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  • I have tried with other transmission powers and the beacons are all near the board. I was just asking this because the radius beacons are having an extrange behaviour compared to the other beacons configured with similar values. – Eylen Jan 30 '17 at 13:38
  • That certainly is not expected. I have a RadBeacon Dot on my desk, and I count 8-10 packets per second received by an Android device next to it when it is configured to advertise at 10Hz. While it is certainly possible that you have one device with a hardware issue (low battery, broken antenna, etc.), if you are seeing this with two different Dots, I think a configuration or test setup issue is more likely. – davidgyoung Jan 30 '17 at 14:15
  • Hm I had thought it was a much lower proportion than that, due to the 3 advertisting channels (as I said in an email to you David :). – O'Rooney Feb 07 '17 at 23:23