Range testing … bigger field needed.
We started testing the radio range of the Essentials range yesterday and went over to the playing field behind our offices and set up a transmitter and receiver pair with a simple LED flashing to indicate whether the signal was received or not. We got some fantastic results:
Standard Essentials radio with the antenna we normally ship: 75m
Opening the case and pulling the aerial vertically straight: 100m
This was far better than expected, we had been hoping for a range of 30m so we actually saw in real life over double what we were expecting.
We got an interesting result when we tested the new “LR” version of the essentials, which is the same as the standard range but contains a Long Range transmitter and receiver (these have not been announced yet). Using those we got:
Essentials LR version with the antenna coiled inside the unit: 100m
Essentials LR with the aerial pulled straight vertically: > 390m
I say “>390m” because at that point, we ran out of playing field. Wasil, the engineer who was doing the test, felt that the range was nowhere near where what we can achieve if we used a better aerial and we are going to re run the tests once we get some samples in from one of our suppliers next week. We’re secretly hoping to break the 500m mark.
