MultiNav Pro+ BLE - what's the practical indoor range like?

Karen Garcia · 2026-06-23T20:22:56.000Z

So I've been running some outdoor tests with the MultiNav Pro+ BLE module and honestly the range numbers are impressive, but my actual deployment is going to be mostly indoors - think large warehouse environment, concrete walls, steel shelving, forklifts moving around, the usual RF nightmare. I know the 50km spec is line-of-sight with ideal conditions and I'm not expecting anywhere close to that, but I'm trying to get a realistic feel for what kind of range I should be budgeting for in that kind of environment before I commit to my node placement layout.

Replies

Joseph Miller•June 23, 2026

Honestly in a dense warehouse environment with steel racking you're probably looking at somewhere in the 50-200m range per hop depending on how much metal is between nodes - the BLE side takes a bigger hit than the LoRa in those conditions so if you haven't already I'd look at your mesh topology and plan for more nodes than you think you need. I did a similar deployment last year and the forklifts were surprisingly less of an issue than the racking itself, the moving metal actually caused more multipath weirdness than straight up blocking.

Robert Johnson•June 23, 2026

Joseph's numbers match what I saw in a similar setup - I'd also add that antenna orientation made a surprisingly big difference for us, we were losing maybe 30% of expected range just from modules mounted at the wrong angle on the shelf uprights. Definitely plan your mesh dense and then you can always pull nodes out later if you find you don't need them, way easier than going back in to add more.

Adam•June 23, 2026

@Karen Garcia yeah the previous reply in this thread is pretty much on point — 50-200m per hop in a dense warehouse is a reasonable planning number, though I'd honestly budget toward the lower end of that if you've got tall steel racking running perpendicular to your node layout.

The thing that'll hurt you most with the MultiNav Pro+ specifically is that the receiver sensitivity is doing a lot of the heavy lifting outdoors, but indoors you're fighting reflections as much as attenuation — and reflected signals at 2.4GHz in a metal-heavy space can actually cancel out your direct path signal before it would have naturally died. So you might get weird dead spots that feel counterintuitive, like two nodes 80m apart with clear line of sight dropping out while a pair 120m apart with one wall between them holds solid.

Practical advice: before you commit to a fixed layout, do a walk-test with two units and a phone running the Connect app — the live RSSI you'll see there gives you a much better feel for your specific environment than any spec number will. Then add roughly 25-30% more nodes than your walk-test suggests you need, because the forklift traffic introduces enough dynamic multipath that what works at 6am when the warehouse is empty can get patchy by midday when everything's moving.

William Smith•June 23, 2026

Yep, echoing what the others said - dense mesh is the way to go, and I'd throw in that concrete actually scatters the signal in weird ways too, not just blocks it, so don't assume a "clear" line between two nodes is actually clean. In our testing we found 100m as a conservative planning number for that kind of environment gives you enough headroom that your mesh stays stable even when a forklift parks itself in the worst possible spot.

Robert Martinez•June 23, 2026

Good advice all round here - one thing I'd add from our warehouse testing is that the ceiling height matters more than people expect, nodes mounted up high on racking vs down low can behave really differently in terms of what the signal has to fight through. We ended up doing a quick walk-test with just two nodes before finalizing positions and it saved us a bunch of headaches with final placement.

John Johnson•June 23, 2026

Robert's point about height is huge - we actually ended up mounting our nodes about 2/3 of the way up the racking rather than at the top or bottom and hit a sweet spot where we were clearing most of the shelf clutter but not fighting as much ceiling bounce. Also worth doing your walk test at different times of day if you can, a warehouse full of stock vs half-empty can shift your effective range more than you'd expect.

Joseph Anderson•June 23, 2026

Solid thread - to actually answer the OP's question before it got buried, I'd plan for 80-150m per hop depending on how dense your shelving is, and budget your mesh assuming the lower end so you're not scrambling later. The 2/3 height tip from John is legit, that's basically what we landed on too after a lot of trial and error.

Karen Rodriguez•June 23, 2026

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet - metal shelving acts like a reflector as much as a blocker, so you can sometimes get surprisingly good range down an aisle and then basically nothing perpendicular to it, which catches people off guard when they're planning node placement. Definitely factor that directionality into your mesh layout before you commit to fixed mounting positions.

Mary Wilson•June 23, 2026

Karen's point about aisle directionality is something we got burned by on our first deployment - we planned the mesh on a grid assumption and had to add two extra nodes because the signal just refused to go sideways through the racking. Ended up treating each aisle almost like its own RF zone and planning coverage along them rather than across, which made the node count way more predictable.