RFOXiA LogoRFOXiA Club
← Back to DevHub

MultiNav Pro+ BLE - TX power stepping for adaptive range, anyone tried it?

Michelle Riggs•October 16, 2026
Working on a deployment where the nodes aren't always going to be at max range - sometimes they're 50 meters apart, sometimes way out there. Running everything at full TX power all the time feels wasteful, especially on the battery budget. I'm wondering if anyone has experimented with dynamically stepping down TX power when RSSI is strong and then ramping it back up as the link gets marginal. Basically a crude adaptive power control loop without relying on any formal APC spec.
💬 1 replies👍 0 likes👁 0 views

💬 Want to join this discussion?

Join the Community on RFOXiA Club →

Replies

Adam•October 16, 2026
@Michelle Riggs yeah this is actually a pretty clean approach on the STM32WB07 — the `aci_hal_set_tx_power_level` call lets you step through the power levels at runtime, so you can absolutely build a simple hysteresis loop around your RSSI readings without anything fancy.
 
The main thing to be careful about is hysteresis band width. If your thresholds are too tight you'll end up thrashing between power levels when RSSI is hovering near the boundary — especially in environments with any multipath. I'd recommend something like a 6-8 dBm margin between your step-down and step-up triggers, and only evaluating every N packets rather than on every RSSI sample.
 
One thing worth factoring in for the MultiNav specifically — the external PA stages mean the relationship between the radio's TX power register and your actual radiated power isn't purely linear across all levels, so it's worth doing a quick empirical mapping at a few known distances before you trust the loop to behave predictably. The GitHub repo has some of the lower-level radio control examples that'll give you a starting point for the timing and register access.

💬 Want to join this discussion?

Join the Community on RFOXiA Club →