Panasonic Bluetooth5 for tough rf Panasonic has introduced an external antenna Bluetooth 5 Low Energy (LE) module for use in shielded housings and enclosures.

Called PAN1770, it is designed around a Nordic Semi’s nRF52840 Bluetooth IC and has a lot on common with Panasonic’s earlier built-in antenna PAN1780.

Antenna connection for the PAN1770 is through a uFL connector, and 8dBm is available at the output (configurable from -20dBm in 4dB steps, plus -40dBm whisper mode) together with -95dBm receive sensitivity at 1Mbit/s or -103dBm at 125kbit/s. “In combination with the LE coded PHY, this makes the module very attractive for applications where a long range is required,” according to Panasonic.


Consumption is 4.8mA in transmit (0dBm) and 4.8mA in receive, then there is an 400nA ‘off’ and a ~0700nA RTC wake-up mode.

There is 802.15.4 support for Matter, Zigbee and Thread, and, needing its own external antenna, there is NFC A (Type 2 near field communication) for pairing and payment applications.

Processing on the Nordic chip comes from a Arm Cortex M4F with 256kbyte of ram and 1Mbyte of flash.

Up to 48 programmable GPIOs are available for hardware control, some with PWM or ADC capability, along with SPI, I2C, UART and USB2.0 serial busses.

It measures 15.6 x 8.7 x 1.8mm.

The PAN1770 web page can be found here.