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8 years, 7 months ago.
SX1276MB1MAS 433MHz range problem
Hi,
We have a problem with SX1276MB1MAS and ST32F411RE Nucleo boards. The SX1276PingPong tests at 433 MHz band are very poor in range, compared to 868 MHz.
With a spectrum analyzer we can detect a well formed FSK spectrum signal with power levels of -70 dBm near the receiver board. But the demodulator receives the frames with errors. The theoretical sensitivity is about -105 dBm. The band is a bit more noisy in 433MHz, but this not explains this diference in range compared to 868 MHz.
The antenna is connected on the LF side. We are using the 433MHz antenna that comes with SX1276MB1MAS. We bought another SX1276MB1MAS board to discard a hardware problem, but the behaviour was the same.
We have corrected some issues in SX1276PingPong mbed application. One of those is that in callback function "OnTxDone" from DIO0 isr, it needs a delay of 2 mseconds before sending the transceiver to sleep. If this wait is not implemented, the transmitter could be sleeping when is yet transmitting the CRC bytes and the receiver could detect a CRC error. This bug seems that is only affecting to 433MHz.
However, even with the improvements, behavior at 433 MHz remains worse than expected.
We have tested with other Nucleo boards (NUCLEO-F334R8) and the problem persist.
We suspect that the problem could be in the transmission branch, because if we put attenuators in the receptor antenna, the RSSI measured in demodulator can reach -100dBm. One might conclude that the signal is already noisy when leaving the transmitter itself. But we aren't sure of that.
Is there any error in SX1276 transceiver at 433MHz that is not documented in the errata-sheet?
Is there any design bug in SX1276MB1MAS or antenna tunning?
Does 433MHz band need any special register setting?
Does anybody have had these same problems with 433MHz? I have found a post in openlora forum that could be related with this issue: http://openlora.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=651&hilit=433
In February we contacted with Semtech support but we haven't got any response about this issue.
Thank you and regards,
Gilen
