Silicon Labs provides RF range calculators for customers to help estimating the actual range of their wireless applications. Simple RF Range Calculator is available to download from the following link below.

http://www.silabs.com/documents/public/software/RF-Range-Calculator.zip

RF range depends on the following parameters:

• Conducted TX output power: the power driven to the antenna input [dBm]
• TX antenna gain [dBi]
• Conducted receiver sensitivity [dBm]
• RX antenna gain [dBi]
• Frequency [MHz]
• Propagation factor (depends on the environment)

Simple RF Range Calculator

Simple RF Range Calculator is for those customers who don’t want to deal with difficult RF questions, just simply would like to get fast and reasonable results for both outdoor and indoor environments.

Key features:

• Fast and simple while accurate
• Built in propagation factors, based on field measurements
• Antenna height fixed to 1 to 1.2 meters
• Supports all the unlicensed bands and custom frequency channels as well

Usage

Simple RF Range Calculator provides fast and accurate result as the customer selected the frequency band and set TX and RX parameters.

Frequency bands and custom frequency channels can also be selected.

TX Output Power and RX Sensitivity need to set up based on the radio device’s actual link parameters based on the data sheet.

If the exact antenna parameters are unknown notes at the right side can help to determine the closest values.

The achievable RF range depends on many other factors as well. See the following KBA article for further details on RF range factors:

https://www.silabs.com/community/wireless/proprietary/knowledge-base.entry.html/2017/12/07/rf_range_factors-fnT1