In reality you don’t need 50+ meter range. Connection reliability is a matter of multiple factors including the used method to transfer the data. If you have a good signal over 1Km distance, but the signal is prone to interference that is not good. If you have a signal that is reliable over 30meter and interference is not happening at all that is a lot better and the option to go for. As Lee pointed out, we are always close to the receiver, so terrible range is not really needed as long as the signal is always strong enough to get through to the other side. Riding in urban environments with tons of interference from other RF devices is the challenge. There was a group ride in London recently and the Wands didn’t cut out a single time although the list of other Bluetooth devices you get listed in the App is beyond any scale.
There is also 5G around there. That is the worst environment to put a remote into. If the riders do not face any interference and have a stable signal at all times that is a good indicator for a very very high reliability.
With PPM we did get cutouts in London, with BLE we do not see such things. There is still room to make the receiver side stronger and we might make a device that has twice the output power.
Another thing Hexacopter should point out is Certification. As soon as you mount a random antenna any certification is not valid any longer. So he needs to test modules with similar certification standards against each other.
1 Like