Bluetooth Dongle Range Claims

[BONTEMPI]

Hi,

I've developed a proximity marketing app around the WCL developer edition, but we are struggling with the hardware and the range they claim, to what is actually acheived.

We have a Cheap dongle that claims a range of 100m and a more expensive version the SENA UD100 that claims 300m without the antenna and 1000m with it attached. In reality it's going about 20m using both during the discovery stage. Both have been tested and installed on the microsoft stack and the toshiba stack on a Windows 7 machine.

Is there something I could be missing or is this just a general issue with these smaller transmitters? Also, What impact could the discovery timeout property have if increasing it higher, will that yield a further distance?

As this app is due to go out for trials this is causing a major headache, Please help?

Thanks


Nick

[Mike Petrichenko]

Hi,

All I can do is recomend AirCable product. But you should to think about other side (phone). If PC has good dongle but phone has lowpower one then distance will be very short. 20 m is really good result. However, try AirCable Host XR dongle. It can give you up to 50 meters on open space.

Discovery timeout: Than is higher then more devices can be found.

[BONTEMPI]

Hi Mike thanks for the reply.

If you are saying it's down to the quality of the phones transmitter then what difference would the air cable product make?

Correct me if i'm wrong but lets say a phone has a 10-15 m range and the air cable product hit's that phone from 30m out the response from the phone will never get back to the calling dongle?

So in theory no matter what the dongle range you have on your pc you are limited by the lack of range that's implemented on the phone.

If this is the case then the whole concept is flawed on the hardware side of things until phones start to catch up.

With Bluetooth 3 also on the horizon, is this something the wcl library can take advantage of when it finally arrives?

Thanks again

Nick

[Mike Petrichenko]

Hi,

You are right. It is mostly limited by a phone's receiver/transmitter. However, if you have powerfull dongle on PC side then it can receive very low signal from a low-power phone's transmitter. So sumary it increases a range to up 50-100 meters. We have been tested AirCable Host XR 1 and found that average distance is about 50-60 meters. May be you can get the same result with your dongles. But as you can understand you will never get promised 300 meters between dongle and cell phone (usualy it is distance between 2 identical dongles on open space).

Actuly WCL is not related to such things as gonles power and distnace It simple uses hardware you have. And, of course, Bluetooth 3 does not add something to high-level (in common case).

[BONTEMPI]

Yes Mike I know the Library has nothing to do with the range problem. The library is great and is a very worthy investment. 

What I was asking was when Bluetooth 3 finally comes out will the library support any new features on offer? Or will it just support the extra transfer speed?

Thanks again

Nick

[Mike Petrichenko]

As soon as new features will come with futured Bluetooth specifications - the WCL will inlcude them as well. Of course, it may take a time to mimplement tham all

Regarding BT 3. Currently it appears only as speed improvment. Will see what we will have finaly