U1/UWB distance

Hello, I recently experimented with the Nearby Interactions demo project for the U1/UWB chip. When using my iPhone 12 Pro and an Apple Watch Series 6 I was only able to go a distance of 16 feet before to connection would seem to break. Does anyone know if there is a way to utilize these chips to support calculating the distance between devices at a greater distance than what I was able to get?

In general UWB devices can range even being 30-50m apart.

However that really depends if this is line-of-sight situation and also how big is the antenna/antennas and its orientation. E.g. signal that is going over human body/wall might be weaker.

Note also that U1<>U1 or U1<>UWB interaction is done typically over both BLE&UWB where the initial "hand-shake" is over BLE because this is lower-power. BLE is typically more sensitive to obstacles/orientation.

Finally, it seems Apple wanted U1 to be used for "NEARBY Interactions", so perhaps that is their design choice to optimize only for objects that are around, perhaps within human-eye visible range, thus range might be limited artificially as well.

U1/UWB distance
 
 
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