ecrampton 0 Posted January 17, 2015 Share Posted January 17, 2015 I am currently trying to extend the range of my nrf24l01+ modules. My current working setup is running a raspberry pi and a msp430g2553 (launchpad) using the nrf24l01+ with only the pcb antenna. Currently those are about 10 meters away from each other and they work great (~100% success rate) at that distance. In order to extend the range I tried to change out one of those modules with the pcb antenna and tried hooking a PA LNA to my msp430, this resulted in me only getting like a 10% success rate of packets being sent and received. I then hooked up a 3.3 regulator to supply power to the PA LNA board and that did not seem to have any effect. As I understand this module will take about 115mA when transmitting and 45mA when receiving which should easily be delivered by my regulated 3.3V. I tried this with two different PA LNA modules and they both perform the same. I am currently using the spirilis library wtih gcc (not that this should matter). But are there any registers that need to change in order to get the PA/LNA module working vs the pcb antenna modules? Again from my understand the PA/LNA is all external and in hardware and should not effect the operation of the nrf24l01+ which is why I am confused as to why it is not working. Any help suggestions would be appreciated. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
petus 11 Posted January 19, 2015 Share Posted January 19, 2015 Maybe, I had a problem with power supply. The header was poorly gilded. If I wanted to send message, the modul was resetting. If you have a possibility measure voltage (oscilloscope), do it. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
spirilis 1,265 Posted January 19, 2015 Share Posted January 19, 2015 I can't say my PA+LNA modules added much range but they definitely performed a tad better than PCB antenna. What really added range fwiw is the SI24R1 nrf24-compatible taiwanese modules (pcb trace, haven't found any RPSMA modules yet) with a +7dBm bonus TX mode. Sent from my Galaxy Note II with Tapatalk 4 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
ecrampton 0 Posted January 23, 2015 Author Share Posted January 23, 2015 Thanks for the replies. I was able to grab a decent power supply from work and test it. Unfortunately that didn't work. The PSU is showing a spike of 170mA I wonder if this is also a power issue with the header. In any case if I can't get these working I think my plan will be to add in repeaters as necessary and just use the standard PCB trace modules and further look into the SI24R1 modules. Thanks. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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