Very high variations in ranging and distances

I’m using the phonegap plugin (0.7.1) to develop for Android. Even if it somewhat works, I get big variations which makes the whole thing pretty useless. For instance, if I just leave my tablet where it is, it goes from ranging 0 beacons to 1 or 2 back to 0 etc. with distances greatly affected and doesn’t really makes sens. Even with the Estimote app, the distance demo ins’t reliable at all. Long story short, it’s all over the place.
So what can I do to enhance that? All my beacons are -8db and 500ms. Should I change some of the settings? Is it a phonegap plugin issue? Is it a hardware issue? I placed the beacons here around my apt which isn’t that big and I get more of “no ranging” than proper ranging and distancing. Even if I’m close to one, it would be ranged on and off. Please advise…

Update: It seems like the blue tooth of the Nexus 7 2013 is not that good. Works a lot better on Nexus 5!!
Now I don’t get drops anymore but the strength varies a lot. Is there any recommended setting for the beacons to get a more stable distance/strength feedback?

The quality of the Bluetooth hardware in Android devices sadly varies a lot, with the general rule being that the newer the device, the better.

You could try playing with the values broadcasting power (the higher it is, the better signal coverage) and advertising interval (the lower the better), just keep in mind that they also affect the battery life of a beacon.

With our native Android SDK, you can also play with the parameters that affect how frequently and for how long the Android device is scanning for beacons, via the setForegroundScanPeriod method. I’m not sure if the PhoneGap plugin you’re using gives access to this method though—if not, maybe you could ask the maintainers of the plugin to add it.

Yes it was disappointing to see how bad it performed on my tablet, but the phone got my hopes back up :smile:
Thanks for the tip, I’ll check the plugin in depth…

To be fair, tablets usually fare worse than smartphones, this is true for iPads vs iPhones as well.