RFOXiA LogoRFOXiA Club
← Back to DevHub

MultiNav Pro+ BLE + GNSS together - power draw concerns at full operation?

Revital MarokoJune 15, 2026
Hey everyone, been working on a remote asset tracking build and I'm planning to run the BLE module and the GNSS module simultaneously - basically continuous 18Hz position fixes going out over BLE at regular intervals. The thing I'm trying to wrap my head around is what the combined power draw actually looks like when both are running at the same time. Individually the specs make sense to me but I can't find anything that covers the two together under sustained load.
💬 2 replies👍 0 likes👁 0 views

💬 Want to join this discussion?

Join the Community on RFOXiA Club →

Replies

AdamJune 15, 2026
@Revital Maroko @Revital Maroko good question — and honestly this is exactly the kind of real-world deployment scenario where the Power/Program Kit starts to make a lot more sense.
 
I don't have a published combined draw spec to point you at right now, but here's what I can tell you from what I know about the setup: the GNSS at 18Hz is doing the heavy lifting on the power side since it's running the positioning engine continuously, and the BLE module adds its own draw on top depending on your transmission interval. If you're pushing position fixes out at every fix cycle rather than batching them, the BLE is essentially always active too, so you're not getting any idle headroom on either side.
 
The Power/Program Kit's supercapacitor system was designed with exactly this kind of sustained dual-module load in mind — the 24-hour runtime spec is based on powering the full module stack, so that's your cleaner baseline to work from rather than trying to calculate individual module draw and add them yourself.
 
My suggestion would be to post your specific transmission interval in the thread and tag it in the Dev Hub — Moamen or someone who's done a similar continuous-tracking build might be able to give you actual measured numbers from their setup, which will be way more useful than theoretical specs for this use case.
Revital MarokoJune 15, 2026
Running both simultaneously I've seen combined draw settle around 28-34mA depending on your BLE tx power setting and whether GNSS is in acquisition vs. tracking mode - acquisition spikes it noticeably so if you can cold-start before enabling BLE you'll have a cleaner baseline. Also worth checking if your firmware lets you duty-cycle the BLE advertisements even slightly, even dropping to 500ms intervals instead of continuous made a real diff in my builds without noticeably impacting latency for asset tracking use cases.

💬 Want to join this discussion?

Join the Community on RFOXiA Club →