CC1100E: CC1100 design not passing EN300220 test

Hello Leif,

Have you tried with the CC1101 - if I remember it's nearly a drop in replacement for the CC1100 with better performance?

We had problems getting the CC1101 through EN300220 at 868MHz initially and as well as turning the power amplifier down, we discovered that the crystal we were using (26MHz) had a harmonic close to our transmission frequency and so we had to switch it to a 27MHz crystal and change the configuration registers to use the new value. It might be worth trying a different frequency crystal?

Thanks,

Steve

Which clause in EN300220 (I assume v3.1.1) does the unit fail?

Do you use CC1100E for 433 MHz? Why not CC1101?

I am unsure which clause they refer to, but they mentioned the following "Emission Radiated inside the frequency band is failure, outside is pass.
" we use CC1100E for 433Mhz. And has not added CC1101 at the moment. At a stage we did not want to add a new parameter to the project with adding a upgraded part to communicate with old parts CC1100. Since the marked has already many units running with the CC1100. It might be that we need to take that step as it looks right know:). Anyway do you think that changing the crystal frequency could be a posibility to improve this as Steve mentioned? Or is it better to go right on with switching to CC1101? Any recomandations on crystal or which parameters that I should consider critical?

Br Leif G

I find it strange that you use CC1100E since this is a product targeting the 470 - 510 MHz band in China.

The reason I ask about the clause is that it looks like you are testing with sending packets. The test lab should be able to give you exact information about which clase you failed and which version they use of EN300220

Ok I was not aware of the E china version. We use the CC1100 and not the E version.
The test use ETSI EN 300 220-1 V2.4.1. Has not asked for more detail regarding the clause, will do that.

And Yes we sends messages. I assume We should configure a carrier only. HAve to check which command to use for puting the device in this mode.

Note that now 3.1.1 is the version that should be used for EN300220. This version of the standard is very clear how you should set up the device for the different test cases (CW or random packet).

I just assumed you used CC1100E since the title of the thread contain that name.

Hello,

Some back and forward information her, sorry by that. Yes we use ETSI EN 300 220-1 V3.1.1 (2017-02) and the clause that we fail on is 5.9.2.

We anyway activated the random tx mode in the CC1100 and our spectrum analyser showed us a quite different picture than when sending data. So we will now send Nemko two units one with lowered output power and one with max output power. And then wait for the result.

Thanks so much for your help:) We hope this solves our case.

Br Leif Gunnar Ellingsen

Have you turned on PA ramping?

Nop, should that be done? If you have a short setup for me on how to add the required configurations it would have been very nice:)

Br Leif G

According to 4.3.1.1 in it looks like you can select testsignal, including a CW.

Yes, I would recommend doing PA ramping. If you don't enable this and send packets, the packets will look like a square wave in the time domain (power on the y axis). A square is a lot of side lobes in the frequency domain meaning that to get a better spectrum you have to shape the transition from 0 to max power some.

The start of this thread covers the how:

e2e.ti.com/.../323536