BLE vs RF TPMS: Which Wireless Band Fits Your Vehicle BLE and 433.92 MHz RF tyre sensors solve different problems. What each band is good at, where BLE is weaker, and how to pick for a vehicle programme.

Two radios, two different products

A tyre-pressure sensor is a radio transmitter with a pressure gauge attached. The gauge half is broadly similar whoever builds it: a sensing element, a microcontroller, a coin cell and a housing that survives weather. The radio half is where the two families separate, and the separation is not about quality — it is about the rest of the system.

On one side sits the arrangement that grew up in trucks, trailers and industrial equipment: a sensor transmits on a licence-free sub-GHz band, 433.92 MHz in most of the world and 315 MHz in parts of the Americas, to a dedicated receiver. That receiver is usually a display in the cab, or a box that feeds the vehicle's own instrument cluster.

On the other side sits Bluetooth Low Energy, which is what our own sensors use. The sensor still measures pressure and temperature, but it broadcasts in the 2.4 GHz ISM band — 2400 MHz to 2483.5 MHz on BLE 4.1 — and a phone, tablet or existing display unit does the listening. There is no receiver in the box, because the customer already owns one.

Once you describe it that way, the comparison stops being a specification fight and becomes a system question. That is why the honest answer to "which one is better" starts with what the vehicle already has and who will own the user interface. The BPU100 sensor page shows what the BLE side looks like in practice.

Where the sub-GHz arrangement still wins

Display-based sub-GHz systems have three real advantages, and none of them is about being mature technology.

They work with no phone involved. The receiver is part of the vehicle. A driver who has never paired a Bluetooth device in their life can still get a pressure reading and an alarm, and the fleet manager knows the system does not depend on a personal handset being charged and present.

They reach further. A sub-GHz transmitter covers a long vehicle far more comfortably than 2.4 GHz does. Where the sensors are on a trailer and the display is in the tractor unit, or where the vehicle is a long wheelbase machine with metal between the two ends, sub-GHz with repeaters is the established answer.

They fit fleet maintenance routines. No app versions, no phone operating-system updates, no pairing procedure that a workshop has to be trained on. For a fleet operator, that stability is worth more than a nicer interface.

If you are building a truck, a trailer, a bus or heavy equipment maintained by a fleet, there is little reason to argue with that package. Our optional UART and CAN receivers cover the cases where a wired output is needed, as the truck and heavy page sets out.

Where BLE wins

There is no receiver to design, tool, stock, install or warrant. This is the commercial heart of it: the sensor plus an app is the whole system. A sub-GHz system's display was never free — it had to be engineered, tooled, warehoused, supported and replaced under warranty. Removing it removes a cost line, a stock line and a failure mode.

There is no harness. That changes who can fit the product. A dealer who will not pull apart a bike's loom to fit a display will happily swap a valve-stem sensor and install an app. On two-wheelers, scooters and light three-wheelers that distinction decides whether the product sells at all.

The alarm logic lives in software. With a display system, thresholds and alarm behaviour are in the receiver firmware, and changing them means a firmware cycle. With BLE, they live in the app or the host device, so behaviour can change with a release, and in an OEM programme the customer's own software can own it.

One band covers every market. There is no 433.92 MHz versus 315 MHz split to manage, no regional RF variant and no separate approval path tied to the band. One sensor serves markets that a sub-GHz platform would force you to split into two SKUs — for a distributor building a range, a genuine simplification.

Where BLE is genuinely weaker

Being straight about this matters more than another feature list, because BLE is not the right answer for every vehicle.

Range is short. 2.4 GHz does not travel like sub-GHz, and the BLE link is designed for sensor-to-phone distances, not sensor-to-cab-across-a-trailer distances. If your sensors and your listener are metres apart with steel in between, do not try to make BLE do that job. Use sub-GHz.

The phone is the display. If the phone is off, in a pocket or out of battery, there are no live readings and no alarms. Riders who want a permanent dash readout should be looking at a dedicated display, and we will say so rather than sell the architecture we happen to build.

2.4 GHz is crowded. Wi-Fi and every other Bluetooth peripheral share that spectrum. Our link budget is 3 dBm transmit against −95 dBm receiver sensitivity at 1 Mbps, which is comfortable for the distances involved, but what matters is what the app does when a packet is missed — it should show a stale or missing value rather than hold the last number on screen.

It puts software on your critical path. If you are an OEM or a brand, someone has to own the app, the iOS question, the update policy and the support calls. That is a real ongoing cost, and it lands on the side of the business that is least used to running it.

Side by side

Question	Sub-GHz (433.92 / 315 MHz)	BLE (2.4 GHz)
Dedicated receiver	Required	Not required — phone or existing screen
Typical separation	Long vehicle, trailer, machine	Sensor to rider or cab-adjacent device
Regional variants	433.92 MHz and 315 MHz split	One band worldwide
Alarm logic lives in	Receiver firmware	App or host software
Works with phone off	Yes	No live readings
Harness to the vehicle	Usually yes	No
Typical fit	Trucks, trailers, fleet equipment	Two-wheelers, e-bikes, ATVs, OEM products with an app

Five questions that decide it

1. Does the vehicle already have a screen that could receive? If yes, BLE removes parts. If no, and a dash display is required, sub-GHz is the shorter path.
2. How far apart are the sensor and the listener, and what is between them? More than a couple of metres with metal in the way favours sub-GHz.
3. Who owns the user interface? If the brand must own the customer's experience, plan for the app from day one — that is a project decision, not a catalogue choice.
4. How many markets? Multiple destinations with a single RF plan favours BLE, because there is no band split to manage.
5. Who supports the software in three years? A BLE product without an answer has an unowned liability in it.

Mixed fleets are normal

Plenty of customers end up with both: a sub-GHz display in the cab and BLE sensors on assets a technician services with a phone. Treating the radio as a choice per vehicle rather than a company-wide decision costs nothing, which is why our receivers are optional items.

Where we stand

Our sensor platform is BLE 4.1 on 2400–2483.5 MHz, 3 dBm transmit, 1 Mbps air rate, −95 dBm receiver sensitivity at 1 Mbps. Power is a CR1632 coin cell that the user can replace without re-pairing the sensor. Operating temperature is −20 °C to +80 °C, storage −40 °C to +85 °C, humidity 5–95% non-condensing, and the sensor reports pressure, temperature and alarm state.

We are a Bluetooth house. If your requirement is a dedicated in-cab display on 433.92 MHz, we will tell you so instead of bending the platform around it. Where the vehicle already has a phone or a screen, BLE removes parts, cost and installation friction — and on a two-wheeler that is usually the whole argument.

We build the sensor ourselves in Shenzhen, with capacity of 30,000 sensor units a month and more than 10,000 sets a month going into the Chinese two-wheeler aftermarket. Every unit is pressure-calibrated on our own test software, and we run water-immersion, RF-range, protocol-verification, powered-ageing, battery-current, appearance and dimension checks, finishing with a full wheel-position system test — eight steps in total, in-house. Certification is handled per market and per project, and we will put the current status in writing rather than offer a reassuring sentence.

If you are weighing the two architectures against one specific vehicle, tell us the vehicle, the wheel count and the market and we will say which one fits — including when the answer is the architecture we do not build.