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MultiNav Pro+ BLE - does RSSI stay meaningful at extreme ranges?

Thomas RodriguezJune 23, 2026
Working on a project where I need rough distance estimation between a base node and a few remote units spread out across a pretty wide area - think agricultural monitoring, so we're talking open fields, minimal obstructions. The 50km BLE range on the MultiNav Pro+ is honestly what sold me on this whole setup, but I'm trying to figure out if RSSI is actually usable as a proximity proxy at those distances or if it just kind of bottoms out into noise and becomes useless for anything beyond "connected / not connected".
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Replies

Charles SmithJune 23, 2026
At those ranges RSSI gets pretty squirrelly tbh - you'll still see *a* value but the variance swamps the signal-to-noise enough that you're basically just getting "far" vs "very far" rather than anything you can math into a real distance estimate. For ag monitoring across open fields you might get better mileage pairing it with GPS coords on the remote units and using RSSI just as a link quality sanity check rather than a ranging input.
AdamJune 23, 2026
@Thomas Rodriguez yeah RSSI is going to get increasingly unreliable as you push toward the far end of that range, and for agricultural-scale distances I'd honestly treat it more as a signal health indicator than a distance estimator.
 
The core problem is that at extreme ranges the RSSI values compress — you're operating near the receiver sensitivity floor so small changes in actual distance produce almost no meaningful change in the dBm reading. Multipath and atmospheric variation (which matters more than people expect over open flat terrain, ironically) adds noise that swamps whatever distance signal is left.
 
For your use case though, you've actually got a much cleaner solution right there in the ecosystem — the GNSS module at 18Hz fix rate and 1.5m accuracy is genuinely what you want for distance estimation between nodes, not RSSI. Pair each remote unit with a GNSS module, stream the coordinates back over the BLE link, and you get precise positions rather than a fuzzy RSSI proxy. That also fits perfectly with the Sensors Module stack if you're doing agricultural environmental monitoring anyway.
 
RSSI on the MultiNav Pro+ is still worth logging as a link quality indicator — it'll tell you if a node is marginal or solid — just don't try to use it as a rangefinder past maybe a few hundred meters.
Thomas WilliamsJune 23, 2026
Charles is right on the money - at that kind of range RSSI is really only good for "are we still connected" checks, the variance just gets too wild to derive anything meaningful from it. If you need actual proximity data I'd lean into the GPS approach he mentioned, or look at whether your use case could work with periodic GPS beacons from the remote units and just use BLE as the transport layer rather than asking it to do ranging duty it wasn't really designed for at 50km.

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