I worked on a custom PCB that is supposed to be able to receive transmissions, however on SmartRF during testing I can't get it to transmit or receive packets. I have two Launchpad XL's where they can talk to each other and transmit/receive packets fine, but when I remove either launchpad and replace it with my PCB, it can't receive/transmit packets. To be clear, it will transmit packets and says DONE_OK in the output window, however the Launchpad won't receive anything. Vice versa doesn't work either where the Launchpad transmits and the custom PCB receives.
Interestingly, though, continuous mode works with both the Launchpad and the custom PCB being either the receiver or transmitter, although signal power isn't stellar as the max I see is -20dB gain on either devices being the receiver. The gain is also very inconsistent:
This is with the custom PCB being the receiver, and the Launchpad shows something similar when it's the receiver. Any idea why this could be happening? I initially had the wrong type of 24MHz crystal oscillator connect where it had a ground, VCC, tri-state, and output whereas our design was meant to use a crystal with two grounds and two pins being the connections to the oscillator and I ran it like that before realizing I needed to change the crystal I used. Could that have damaged anything? When that incorrect crystal was in, the custom PCB wouldn't even try to start transmitting or receiving as it would be stuck in an IDLE state.
I will link the github that has our PCB schematic and gerber files if you wanted to look at that: Emrick/hardware/Emrick at main · eduxstad/Emrick · GitHub
Any help would be appreciated here. I'm baffled as to why I can't do packet transmissions but I can do continuous. We also used the antenna design from the Launchpad, and we removed C12 so there isn't a connection currently to the external antenna, just a connection to the onboard antenna, AE1.