Dear forum,
I recently came across this company website and their product UWB3000F27. Does it really include official Qorvo parts? Is it possible to buy a similar device (Dw3000 + Power Amplifier) directly from the Qorvo site?
Thanks and best regards,
Christian
It does seem like it.
Adopting Qorvos chips isn’t something new in particular, there are many adaption boards for special use cases out there. As far as I know, Qorvo sells seperate amplifiers in their shop, but no combined module.
On the other side, you’d probably have to check your countries regulations on the maximum power for UWB applications, as the 500mW mentioned seems to be quite high for most countries in non-emergency use-cases.
Kind regards
Fhilb
The 500mW are definitely too high. It is interesting, so far I was going with Makerfab’s ESP32 DW1000 based modules. In my use case (indoor navigation wo GPS), I really saw a difference when I switch to the Pro variant, which apparently has an inbuilt PA. It would be nice to have an off the shelf variant with PA, like NiceRF does, which safes me some integration effort.
Anyway thanks for confirming Fhilb.
I do like that their spec is clearly just a copy and past of the underlying UWB chip specification.
They include the lines:
- Worldwide UWB Radio
- Regulatory compliance
I’d love to see their definition of regulatory compliance. It probably involves never transmitting.
Looks like they also sell a version with a small processor added that can perform TWR and basic localisation. The claim ranges up to 1 km.
Meanwhile in for those of us who need to comply with the regulations generally the parts are easily capable to hit the FCC limit without needing an external amplifier. So unless you are using a very poor antenna an amplifier on the transmit side is pointless if you need to stay under the -41.3 average/0 dBm peak limits.
Where an amplifier can help while staying within limits is on the receive side. You can boost the sensitivity of the receiver that way. But of course amplifying somethings that’s getting lost in the noise is both harder (you need a very low noise amplifier) and also less beneficial to simply blasting the signal louder to start with.
Hi Andy, thanks for your feedback. That’s what I feared to hear. My measurements I ran so far, with DW1000 dev boards from Makerfabs as well as the Decawave DW1000M eval boards, had some significant communication loss in cluttered environments ( I performed measurements in a park with trees and bushes, those weren’t in the LOS though). I barely managed to get above 30m with both boards, although the amplifier definitely helped and I could still crank up performance I guess.
Would you have a recommendation for me on the hardware/software side to increase range? I believe amplifying the receiver side could be a nice solution, but is there anything like this I can buy off the shelf?
The boards of above’s manufacturer might solve the problem, but as you said, in an official product it will most definitely hard to avoid the limits.
We managed to get 60m fairly reliably and more intermittently or in more controlled environments. That is assuming LOS. We want the best accuracy possible (we get position accuracy 3cm from truth), non-LOS situations have less accuracy so we don’t care about them. The theory is that if you have something in the way then move things until you don’t.
We got that range by using 850k data rates, the 16 bit decawave SFD and a short packet and preamble. I know they claim a longer preamble helps but I found that benefit very minimal and it slows things down making you more vulnerable to intermittent bursts of noise causing issues.
On the physical side we got the antennas away from the electronics as much as possible (we have a physical antenna above a ground plane rather than a chip or PCB trace antenna sitting on the board). We get all the antennas at least 2 meters above the ground, ideally more.
And while the antennas have a fairly uniform gain pattern we try to mount things so that the variations that do exist are working in our favour.
The DW3000 we didn’t get as good range as the DW1000, that’s probably partly the different frequency and partly we tried a different antenna since the current one wouldn’t work on channel 9 and it wasn’t as good.