Maximum range possible with CC2592 range extender

200 meter indoors or outdoors?

The product will be used indoors. However, most products give a line-of-sight range so that's what I'm working from. So 200 meters indoors would be ideal, but 200 meters outdoors should be acceptable.

200 meters outdoors shouldn't be a problem conditioned that the area is free from reflections (e.g. parking lots or surrounding buildings will reduce range). Tip: place the antenna 4-5 meters above ground. Indoors 200 meter with Bluetooth? No chance. Forget it. Won't work even with a power amplifier as front end.

Outdoors you will be able to get further, see

Indoors it's very difficult to answer since the range will be very dependent on the building structure.

Thanks! What would be a rough guess on the distance indoors? Is 100 meters indoors realistic? Do you think for this application I'm better off using a sub-1GHz band? Since this product will be sold internationally I'd need 868, 915 and 920MHz.

3.5km for Bluetooth? That's impressive!! If 3.5km is possible outdoors, 200 meters doesn't seem to impractical for indoors.

Bluetooth indoors with a 20 dBm range extender? I'd say range will be less than 30 meters. Comparable with an ordinary 2.4 GHz wifi-router at home.

If 100 meter indoor and no intermediate range extenders, 868 MHz wan't do it. Go lower: 433, 144 or why not 27 MHz?

My main concern with lower frequencies is the antenna length. 433MHz is doable, but 27MHz requires a prohibitively long antenna. 433MHz seems like a good solution but I thought that frequency was reserved in the U.S for licensed HAM operators. My understanding is that in the U.S. you can use 433MHz but the power must be really low, so wasn't sure if I can get the desired range. I've not heard of 144MHz and I don't see that listed as a ISM band, so what's the deal 144MHz?

Gut feeling is that 433 really low power (< 10 mW) will do the job but after a quick Google search it seems that 433 isn't ok to use in the US. But 27 MHz is. Don't be afraid of the antenna - make a coil of it and it will be surprisingly small.

Well I think 433MHz is okay in the U.S. at higher powers as long as the on time is very low. For my application we're probably talking an on time of only a few milliseconds every hour or so. Extremely low duty rate. So I'm leaning toward 433 MHz.

Thanks Magnus and TER for the very helpful comments (and for responding on a Sunday so promptly!).

Indoor range is quite hard to estimate as it is highly affected by what kind of indoor environment you are operating in. You can use this tool to estimate the number of walls, etc, you will be able  transmit through: http://e2e.ti.com/support/wireless_connectivity/f/538/t/375823

Also note that to be BLE compliant you must limit your output power to 10 dBm EIRP.

Cheers,
Fredrik

It should be 200M outdoor. By the way, you might not be able to pass CE/FCC/BLE certification if you use such a high TX power.

Math models are fine to use for a general understanding of radio range but at the end of the day, your design has to be so robust that it can cope with future changing radio environment - and the radio environment will change as people move around their furniture, goods and all sorts of things over the years. At my firm, we have a "golden rule" based of many years of experience having deployed tens of thousands of sensors. The rule is: the link margin must to be better than 20 dB at installation time, meaning that if your receiver sensitivity is say -100 dBm, when you install the device, your RSSI (or LQI or whatever number you are using) must have a 20 dB margin - in this case reception must be better than -80 dBm. That gives your enough margin when things start to sour (trust me - they will...).