Bluetooth Audio Range : Less Than You'd Like
nearby - and was never intended to be a long-distance, long-haul solution. Keep that in mind as you ponder placement of your Bluetooth transmitter, speaker system - or where you wander wearing your BT headphones.Things have gotten better: Enhancements in Bluetooth 2.0 chipsets, antenna and transmitter sensitivity, and hardware design improvements are adding up to more powerful and robust audio transmission and reception than in Bluetooth's early days. But it's important to temper your expectations. You may find that even 15 feet away you may experience drop offs, degredation and cut out once you go beyond the edge of your limits.
Bluetooth uses FHSS : frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology to jump around frequencies. And that's a good thing: It really helps minimize the possibility of electrical-RF interference from other devices nearby. As Wkipedia so elegantly states:
"A spread-spectrum transmission offers three main advantages over a fixed-frequency transmission: 1. Spread-spectrum signals are highly resistant to narrow band interference The process of re-collecting a spread signal spreads out the interfering signal, causing it to recede into the background. 2. Spread-spectrum signals are difficult to intercept. An FHSS signal simply appears as an increase in the background noise to a narrowband receiver. An eavesdropper would only be able to intercept the transmission if they knew the pseudorandom sequence. 3. Spread-spectrum transmissions can share a frequency band with many types of conventional transmissions with minimal interference. The spread-spectrum signals add minimal noise to the narrow-frequency communications, and vice versa. As a result, bandwidth can be utilized more efficiently."
