Hello,
I am running a PER test between our device and a Launchpad. Our device is the TX and the Launchpad is the RX. The distance between the devices is about 110m in a field. The PHY setting is the standard 20dBm, 200kbps PHY from the preset list in SmartRF Studio, on channel 902.4MHz.
- The RF signal strength is pretty good. The Launchpad reports an average RSSI of -70.8dBm during the test. This is close to our estimates of what the signal strength should be at this distance.
- The noise floor is pretty low. The Launchpad measures an average RSSI of -98dBm at this location on this channel and same RX BW setting (when our transmitting device is turned off). There are no notable spikes in the noise floor, it's just pretty low and flat vs. time.
- The PER and BER are higher than I expected. Packet length is 76 bytes, PER is 74.5%, BER is 0.23%. Total # of packets received was around 50,000. I was sending a continuous stream of packets so the PER is probably even worse, since I can't account for extra packets that were completely lost vs. ones marked as "Received Not OK".
I suspect the BER should be lower than I'm seeing in these conditions with what seems like pretty strong SNR (27dB). Do you agree, and do you have any suggestions of possible debug methods?
Thanks,
Arthur