Thanks for the reply. Since you seem to have some familiarity with this board I wondered if you might be able to shed some insight into some of the other issues I am having.
For background, I am building firmware that will take a collection of radios, build a reasonable network, and route messages between them with a reliable, in-order delivery service. I have most of the infrastructure working, but I have observed a few things that I do not understand and I assume there is something basic I have not configured correctly.
First, I have tried to use csma based on the devkit code. When I enable csma (using the devkit S2LPCsma() routine which basically sets/clears the csma enable bit in PROTOCOL1 register (and when enabling turns on sleep mode fifo retention in PM_CONF0 register)).
With csma enabled, I can see exhaustion of retries when RSSI_THR is too low, and see that it transmits reasonably otherwise. What is very weird is that with csma enabled on a radio it receives nothing (no data, no crc issues, etc). Do you have a suggestion as to what I may have misconfigured?
Second, since I cannot make progress with csma enabled, I have written my own version. I pick some random number of tries (0..1000) and, constantly read S2LPQiGetCs() (basically reads bit 7 of LINK_QUALIF1) ORing all of the results together. The unusual thing is that I NEVER have seen this register return a non-zero result. This is quite unusual since I have 3 radios where one radio will broadcast a message and the other two radios (within a meter of each other) both try to respond to the broadcast by transmitting a response. It makes me wonder if the carrier sense does not work on this board with its power amplifier.
Third, when my radios are 1000meters apart (PA level about 19dbm per comments) with clear line of sight in a rural area I do not receive any packets (even without csma). I am not seeing crc errors, or DATA_DISC or invalid sync or preambles, just nothing on the irq. Again, I suspect I have some basic configuration wrong. Do you have a suggestion as to what I should examine?
thanks
-brian