Electrical – Increase HM-10 Bluetooth range

arduinobluetoothbluetooth low energy

I recently purchased this HM-10 board. I can connect to it and everything, so it works perfectly. I ran into a problem, the range is only around 7 feet.

How can I increase the range? I need it to go around 30 feet. Thanks!

Datasheets:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/images/c/cd/Bluetooth4_en.pdf
http://www.pridopia.co.uk/pi-doc/BT4.0-HM-10-Serial_Port_BLE_Module_Master_Slave.pdf

Best Answer

It appears that you have a phony HM-10. This is part of the price you pay for ordering cheap from Amazon. If you want to increase range, you can make sure that it's not close to anything metal/conductive.

You could try connecting an external antenna, but you'd have to trim the length to get it right. It's quite likely that the onboard antenna has it's own matching network to match its high impedance to the low impedance of the chip's output. You'll need to fiddle around with wire length to find out how long to be. Be careful, you could destroy the product if you overheat the PCB with your iron, or maybe even blow the chip due to a high SWR.