Antenna tuning for IN100 NanoBeacon dev board

[jlmontie]

I’m evaluating the IN100 Nanobeacon development board and have encountered unexpected signal degradation during line-of-sight range testing. Specifically, the RSSI drops below -90 dBm at distances under 50 feet, despite InPlay’s claim of a BLE range of several hundred meters.

Could you confirm whether the onboard meandered antenna has been impedance-matched and tuned specifically for the 2.4 GHz BLE band? Additionally, are there any design constraints, layout considerations, or shielding sensitivities we should be aware of that might affect real-world performance?

[dilshana]

The overall antenna performance is influenced by the PCB layout and surrounding components.

INA100 NanoBeacon Board

I recently bought these boards , SparkFun NanoBeacon Board - IN100 and SparkFun NanoBeacon Lite Board - IN100 and the tutorial and demo worked fine , however for the range I am only getting about 10-12 ft. I made the changes on the second board as suggested in the tutorial: in the “XO” option under “Global Settings”. First, changing the Internal Capacitor Code from 8 to 11 can add roughly 5-10dB performance which can help increase the range of the IN100. Second, changing the Strength Code from 16 to 19 should also help with overall performance. but it did not help much, was curious what you folks observed ? I did see digikey sells the inplay eval kit which looks like it has a connection for a antenna and was wondering if that might help ? https://www.digikey.com/en/products/det … AGFIC6BfIA thanks

IN100 NanoBeacon™ Bluetooth® Low Energy Beacon SoC