Frequency Setting - Recommended Ranges and Impact on Battery?

You can change the 'frequency' setting on an Estimote - and we've toyed with different settings from 500 - 1500 just to see what happens. But can you clarify recommended ranges and whether you've run any tests on their impact on battery life?

It might be an idea to publish whatever general suggestions you might have for settings on the beacon for different use cases: how to increase range, precision, and the anticipated trade-off in battery life.

Thanks for posting your question!

We recommend using the default interval value of 200 ms, which should provide a proper experience and good battery longevity.

We're running some tests to check the influence of different values on range, precision etc. and will publish it in the knowledge base.

In the meantime check the article on 'frequency' (Advertising Interval): https://estimote.zendesk.com/hc/communities/public/questions/200458547--Hear-a-beacon-when-app-is-closed-no-background-

Hello Ola,

It will be great if you can add somewhere chipset specification for frequency. Accepted range for example.

By the way, is it really a frequency settings in term of signal or is it an advertising interval ?

In your answer you talk about Advertising Interval, but with radio technology, frequency is highly linked to radio channel selection. (And by the way it's useful to be able to set this radio settings to comply to local laws).

Interval would be the correct term. If we used frequency it would have been in reference to interval.

As there were some issues with differences between frequency and advertising interval, we've made an update in our SDK to sort things out.

We decided to change the term to ‘advertising interval’ as it better reflects the underlying concept.

What has changed:
• beacon frequency control is now available.
• we’ve changed the frequency to “advertising interval", so it should be easier to understand.
• Advertising interval is the time in milliseconds between two bluetooth signals sent from the Estimote beacon. It can be set anywhere between 50 - 2000 ms.

Steps to change advertising interval

To read the current interval use readBeaconAdvIntervalWithCompletion: method.
To set advertising the interval you should use writeBeaconAdvInterval:withCompletion method. Property name "frequency" of ESTBeacon class was change to advInterval.

ESTBeacon properties typing was cleared as well. Major, minor and advertising interval are defined as unsigned short type, what is reflected in read and write methods od ESTBeacon. Power is using ESTBeaconPower type which is defined in ESTBeaconDefinitions class.

We've also changed the name of the library from libEstimoteSDK7.a to libEstimoteSDK.a so you should update your project settings.
All the changes are mentioned in the newly created changelog file.