Mesh range / external antenna?

[ninjatill]

Possibly, with all the stability issues in RC.25, I think the out-of-the-box range can only improve. I just bought some external antennas and I’ll be testing soon. But I’m still ready for the RC.26 firmware to improve things.

[SlinBin]

Sweet, thank you for posting this result.
Could you please state what antennas you did the test with ?
BR

[sean13]

I used the ones I linked above. I’ve had the marco polo test running for about a week now and sometimes still do miss a response. Once the whole mesh stopped responding and i had to restart the gateway. I’m not really keen on investigating too much more till 0.8.0-rc26 comes out, since folks here are saying that it improves mesh stability significantly.

[will]

Hey folks! Wanted to jump into this thread to let folks know that RC.26 has been released with a couple of improvements that should improve the effective range between 3rd Gen devices.

• Increased the default nRF52840 transmit power by 8dBm
• Resolved some OpenThread stability issues which limit effective range of a device connected via a gateway device to the Particle Cloud

Instructions for upgrading are available here:

[Updated 12/12] Particle Mesh Known Issues and Fixes

Updating to the most recent release (v0.8.0-rc.26) The most recent release for Particle Mesh is v0.8.0-rc.26. To update your device to this version of firmware, use the following instructions: If you previously tried to set up your device using the Android mobile app and got a Bluetooth (BLE) pairing error (Nexus 6) or an error during device firmware upgrade, you should first manually update the device firmware to 0.8.0-rc.26 using the Using the Particle CLI instructions below. The BLE fix requ…

[Erich]

Hi there, I updated an Argon and some Xenons to the latest FW v0.8.0-rc.26 last Friday. As expected the +8dBm improved the range nicely. I placed the Argon outside the window on the first floor and started walking away from home with a Xenon in my hands. The test was perfomed with both devices having an external antenna for mesh and running the above mentioned Marco-Polo code.

600m (660 yards) are not a problem, if you have a clear line of sight! I probably could have gone even further, but I reached the nearby forest/hills where the clear line of sight ends…;-).

But if you are behind concrete buildings its a totally different story. I got approx. 10-50m.

That’s all for now…

[jtmoderate876]

So the antennas really help. I’m going to order some. Thanks for sharing.

My previous tests with no external antenna and with pre-RC26 was seeing reliability fall off around 150 Feet (50 yards / 46 meters).

[jimbol]

Was that with the built in antennas?

[jtmoderate876]

He states:

The test was perfomed with both devices having an external antenna for mesh