Enabling PHY seems to reduce range of non-PHY devices

[chrish987]

I am not sure if this is expected behaviour or a bug.

My use case is ESP32 sensors detecting beacons for presence reasons. I have been using Bluecharm beacons for a while and it has all been working fine. It is fairly basic just looking for the iBeacons and TLM broadcast for the devices and recording these. I have several ESP32 around the house that work together sharing the presence information.

I have recently upgraded a few of the ESP32 to ESP32-S3 so decided to try PHY (which 1 of the several Bluecharm beacons I have supports).

The only change I made is uncommenting the below in nimconfig.h

/****************************************************
 *         Extended advertising settings            *
 *        NOT FOR USE WITH ORIGINAL ESP32           *
 ***************************************************/

/** @brief Un-comment to enable extended advertising */
// #define CONFIG_BT_NIMBLE_EXT_ADV 1

This has to a certain extent worked - as I now see the PHY broadcasts.

However it seems to significantly reduced something (maybe range??) as the non-PHY beacons are now not detected nearly as well.

I can post my relevant code if this is not expected behaviour. (I have confirmed regressing the setting goes back to previous better detection of the beacons).

[h2zero]

If you are scanning on 1M and CODED PHY then the scanner has to split the time between the phys so some advertisements may be missed. You can change the scan parameters to attempt a better discovery rate.