Initial investigations of the Bluetooth link

Measurements using a live Bluetooth link are performed to establish initial knowledge about the link performance and the payload rate that can be obtained in indoor and outdoor environments. The measurements are conducted using two notebooks each with a Bluetooth PC-card and some specially developed S/W capable of making a duplex link and displaying various error rates as well as payload rate. Two modes are available one using the Bluetooth frequency hopping mode and one mode without frequency hopping. Initial results show that for the packet types allowing for the highest payload in duplex mode, which is 433 kb/s, the payload rate is higher than 200 kb/s within a distance of 10 to 25 meters for the indoor case and some 150 meters for the outdoor case. No improvements by using frequency hopping over non-frequency hopping were seen.