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Measure Bluetooth Signal Strength

I'm using the Bluetooth Simple Server and Simple Client vi's that came with Labview 7.1.

My initial take on these were that the server would record the signal it is sending, and the client would record the signal that it's receiving. The farther you are from the source(server) signal, the weaker the signal will be recieved(by the client).

However, there is no change in the received signal from the sent signal when I run the two programs. There is a slight time delay, but that's expected because I turn on the server first, then I then on the client.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to approach this by measuring the signal strength.
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michanga,

I am not sure I fully understand what you are trying to do. Are you trying to measure BlueTooth signal decay over distance or are you looking for a strength of signal meter much like you would have with a wireless internet connection? Please let us know more about your project so maybe we can help you.

-Regards,
Brett
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I am definitely trying to measure BlueTooth signal decay over distance.

The problem I am realizing with the Simple BlueTooth Client Program - if you're talking with someone in a hallway at the same volume, the farther you get from the person you're talking with, the harder it is for them to hear you. That is the result I am looking for.

With the Simple BlueTooth Client Program, it seems to be compensating for the distance, like when you're talking with someone on the phone from a different location, the sound of the voice doesn't deteriorate with distance.

I appreciate your help Brett.
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You're trying to explore behavior that exists at a much lower level than the LabVIEW Bluetooth communication VIs. Communication functions in high-level programming languages tend to abstract away details like signal strength and packet structure, because 99% of the time, the programmer just needs to get bytes from point A to point B and isn't interested in the lower-level details. This is also the reason you don't see any degradation of the signal; with digital communications protocols, you tend to get either perfect transmission or no transmission (and an error of some kind).

Kileen had some ideas in this thread a while back that you might want to check out. You'll probably have to resort to calls out to the operating system, or perhaps to the specific device driver of the hardware, to get signal strength information.

Regards,
John
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Hey Johnny,
Thanks for the response, and the recommendation. However, I am interested in doing this solely in Labview (for the mere challenge) and not depend on an external proggy to extract the information. The fact that there weren't that many revelant options for this project at sourceforge.net was also a deterent from using an external proggy.
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I forgot to mention, the main reason for using Labview exclusively - we're looking to translate the program from the Desktop to the PDA using the PDA modules.
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