Friday, 16 August 2013

MiWiPro stack tested with MRF89XA

I came to know that India's Ministry of Communication has assigned the 865-867 MHz band for radio frequency devices.
http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?1703

Most of the RF devices in India operates on 2.4GHz frequency even though the range is major concern. The frequency is inversely proportion to distance, so range get shorted if go for 2.4Ghz.

I started searching on internet for any existing provider which have a solution of my application particular on RF band 865-867Mhz and result was no one exist. Finally, I decided to design and started looking for available option for RF transceiver which can support RF band 865-867Mhz and my search was end at Microchip. I finalized the RF chip MRF89XA and MiWiPro stack and started work on that and got success in communication between transceiver. Nowhere any accurate data available for range covered by this module even i had many mail correspondence with microchip support but no fruitful result. After some toughed experiment in field, got range data covered by MRF89XA chip.

So, I published here that data which i got during my testing and you can trust on that.

Consider Parameter:
Tx Power : +12.5 dbm
LNA gain : -13.5 dbm
Data rate : 40kbps

Results for clear RF LOS Horizontal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                        
   PAN coordinator (Node-1)                               Coordinator (Node -2 )              
Received Signal Strength                                        Received Signal Strength              
100m  150m    200m    250m      300m                  100m    150m    200m    250m    300m
1F       21         1B         1D       Connection Fail     20        1E        18         0F      Connection Fail
1E       21         1D         1B                                    21        1F        18         14  
1D      21          19         1A                                    1C       1E        16         18  
1F       23         19         1D                                    1E        20        18         17  
1D      1F         1B         1E                                    1E        1E        14         18  
                                          
Note: All RSSI results are in HEX Value 

Results shows that the distance increase beyond 250 meter, connection gets broken.

1 comment:

  1. HI Saurabh,
    I am using the same RF module, with following stetting are:

    Consider Parameter:
    Tx Power : +10 dbm
    LNA gain : 0 dbm
    Data rate : 10kbps

    Here the application is string current monitoring in Solar farm.
    Basically i am using microchip proprietary mesh stack, but in solar farm many obstacles will be there in the path of wireless module such string of panels, groung levels, etc..
    Because of that i am not seeing even 40m range, but in normal testing keeping LOS maximium range i obtained was 80 to 90 meters.

    My question is how to increase the range? And how did you get more than 200metres of range with same mrf89xa RF module?
    Datasheet itself says that maximum range is up to 120 meters..

    In my study as you decrease the bit rate will get more range that's why i kept it as 10kbps and tx power as 10 db.

    ReplyDelete