Kontakt beacon has garbage response time at 6 metres

Question

I'm reading so much propaganda about BLE beacons (Kontakt.io, in my case) being accurate to the centimetre, readable at 70 metres etc etc, but my experience has been nothing like that.

I have 3 beacons. If they're in the next room over (door open, around 6 or 7 metres), it'll detect maybe one or two, after around 20 seconds. Even then I often need to restart my app over and over to detect it.

Move them to the same room, and they're pretty much okay. Everything's default, scanMode is 'LOW_LATENCY', scanPeriod is 'RANGING', I'm not sure what else I can do.

Do these results sound way off, or are they just not that good?

Answer 1

A few tips about Bluetooth beacons in general, not specifically Kontakt beacons:

• When you need to restart your app to detect beacons, that clearly means it is something on the phone, not the beacons themselves that are the issue. That issue may be the app, the SDK, the Bluetooth stack on the phone, or the phone's bluetooth hardware. Try an off the shelf detector app like BeaconLocate for iOS or Android and also test with a different phone.

• The range of a beacon is dependent on its output transmitter power, typically measured at 1 meter. This output power is adjustable on many hardware beacons and is often set lower than the maximum to save battery on battery-powered models. For best detection results, set the output power to the maximum that configuration allows. An output power at one meter should be at least -59 dBm for best results. Less negative numbers mean more power. Because some phone models have poor sensitivity and measure RSSI inaccurately, you may want to measure with different models. In general iOS models are more predictable receivers.

• The range of a beacon between rooms varies greatly depending on materials in walls, furnishings, and local geometry. A beacon with an output power of -59 dBm at one meter can be reliably detected by a phone with a sensitive receiver at 40 meters away, but only with clear line of sight conditions (typically outdoors). Intermittently, I have seen such beacons be detected outdoors at over 100 meters away. Intermittently means that 99% of packets are lost, a small percentage are successfully received.

Always be skeptical of marketing claims from companies trying to sell you something. The above points should tell you what is achievable from an independent engineering perspective.