CC1101 CRC Error

Was browsing through this forum and saw your post. I'm a little late, but...

I've implemented a small mesh network using the CC1100 (up to 16 devices in a system). There are a few thousand systems out the in the world by now. But from day one I would get sporadic errors in some systems. Serious errors, crazy errors. To make a very very long story short, the problem turned out to be a bad packet but with no CRC error indication from the CC1100. I wound up implementing a second 16-bit CRC and appended it to each packet, so now each packet has the equivalent of a 32-bit CRC, 16 bits of it mine and 16 bits by the CC1100. That cured the random bad packet problem. Seems that eventually random noise or interference will produce a stream of data with a CRC that computes correctly. After all, 16 bits only gives you the likelihood that 1 in 65k transmissions (of noise) will actually have a valid CRC. Since my system transmits continuously it was inevitable that this would happen sooner or later. In some installations it seems that this happened real soon, and often (noisy environment I'm assuming).

Another thing you need to look out for is receiving on the intended channel. Seems some frequencies (image freqs?) far removed from your intended channel just slide right on in there, no questions asked. To get around THAT problem I had to transmit the channel number in my data packet so any receivers could confirm that what they received was on the channel they were tuned to. TI could have saved me about 4 months of my life if a kind warning to this effect were stamped on every chip.

Hi,

I have same issue...!

its a shame that TI does not respond to that  :(  

i observe this in burst transmission mode. i used a software CRC. then i found that software CRC can identify the errors in the packet which are correctly read by CC1101.

i don't have any solution. i recomend to use software CRC.

Thanks

Ushan