NanoPi Neo Air: poor Bluetooth performance when wifi powersave mode disabled

mantabernd · September 2, 2017

Hi,

I'm using my NanoPi NeoAir as a bluetooth streaming sink and as a webserver for several configurations and monitoring of the device.

Bluetooth works fine as long as I don't disable the powersafe mode of wifi. Even in powersafe mode the bluetooth performance is not the best.

If I disable wifi at all the bluetooth performance is great.

My system is: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS 4.11.2

iwconfig:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11  ESSID:"Teebeutel"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 2C:41:38:FB:D7:30
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=31 dBm
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on
          Link Quality=43/70  Signal level=-67 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

how I disable powersafe:

sudo /sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off

Bluetooth is barely usable when powersafe is off...

Any idea? Is this a driver problem?

Thanks for your support.

Regards

Bernhard

Igor · September 3, 2017

Bluetooth and wireless are sharing one antenna stream, channels are close and chip package is low cost. Problems of this kind are expected. When Wireless is transmitting with full power it omits Bluetooth. You can try with optimising wifi: if changing channels, lowering wifi tx power and using G mode effects? With power management off.