LowPowerLab Forum

Hardware support => RF - Range - Antennas - RFM69 library => Topic started by: jose1024 on December 30, 2016, 09:59:37 AM

Title: Can RF69CW and RF69HW talk to each other? [ANSWER: YES!]
Post by: jose1024 on December 30, 2016, 09:59:37 AM
Hi,

This is my first question in this forum. Perhaps a dummy one :-( Sorry for that. I'm a noob in these matters.

I have two spare 433MHz RF69CW and I wonder if I can use them to talk to new Moteinos R5 equipped with RF69HW... at the same frequency of course.

If not, appart from legal regulations which in Spain I guess is OK for 433Mhz and 868 Mhz, what is the preferrable option from the reliability point of view? 868 better than 433? I have an alarm system and a ZWave network using 868 band with no apparent interferences. Would you recommend 433 to prevent interferences?

Thanks a lot

Title: Re: Can RF69CW and RF69HW talk to each other?
Post by: ChemE on December 30, 2016, 10:09:37 AM
Welcome to the forums.  Absolutely they can in fact I'm doing this right this moment with a 915MHz RFM69W on my Moteino and a 915MHz 69HCW breakout board (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12775) I got from SparkFun.  These radios speak the exact same language but the H variant is able to speak much louder (+20dBm vs +13dBm).  The C just denotes that it is pin compatible and the same footprint (16mmx16mm) as the RFM12B.

But a 69W, 69HW, 69CW, and 69HCW can all happily be on the same network as each other and using Felix's library, the different register settings needed for the high power radios is hidden unless you dig into his code.
Title: Re: Can RF69CW and RF69HW talk to each other?
Post by: jose1024 on December 30, 2016, 01:15:29 PM
Hi,

Nice to hear that! Thank you.

Happy new year to everyone!!!
 
Title: Re: Can RF69CW and RF69HW talk to each other?
Post by: Felix on December 30, 2016, 01:26:55 PM
All RFM69*** can talk to each other, they are all using the same SX1231h RF chip. This includes: RFM69W, RFM69HW, RFM69CW, RFM69HCW.
However the HW/HCW variants have different power output (20dBm) than the W/CW variants, and need to be configured a little different in your Arduino sketch, see the RFM69 lib examples for that.