Arch Linux

rohitman

Member

Registered: 2021-05-03

Posts: 2

Realtek Bluetooth Dongle Poor Connection

So I recently purchased a Bluetooth 5.1 USB dongle since I have been having severe connectivity issues with my previous 4.0 dongle and my headphones. I bought the BH519A MPOW model which claims to have Linux support as well with the corresponding driver as an aur package:

rtl8761b-fw

Rebooting allowed my PC to detect the dongle, but my headphones' connectivity was even worse upon connecting to the 5.1 adapter. There are stutters every few seconds when sitting about 1 meter away from the dongle, and I have WiFi disabled at all times so interference from there should not be an issue.
Output of 

 dmesg | grep btusb 

[   15.331478] usbcore: registered new interface driver btusb
[   15.685735] rtk_btusb: Realtek Bluetooth USB driver ver 3.1.897f3bb.20201202-173003
[   15.685960] usbcore: registered new interface driver rtk_btusb 

So it appears the driver is working, but for some reason the quality is abysmally poor for a supposedly better adapter? Observing the connection through blueman has signal strength at 10% link quality and a sub-optimal signal strength (<40%).
I suspect there's conflict from old/other unused drivers since the symptoms show that. I'm not sure what to try next so any advice for what to do or where to look is appreciated.

ivanich

Member

From: Odessa

Registered: 2007-11-02

Posts: 9

Re: Realtek Bluetooth Dongle Poor Connection

Having the very same issue but with another china brand orico, it has the same rtl8761b chip and shares same firmware from bh519a. Worth to mention that I'm using gentoo so it's  not distro specific. Additionally tried it with windows 10 and it works as it should, no audio sluttering, increased range, so apparently there is an issue with Linux kernel driver or firmware.

Last edited by ivanich (2021-05-06 18:00:46)

rohitman

Member

Registered: 2021-05-03

Posts: 2

Re: Realtek Bluetooth Dongle Poor Connection

I've made some progress (maybe?) and unbound the

btusb

module from the BH519A dongle:

sudo sh -c "echo 1-11:1.0 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/btusb/unbind"

but I have not had success binding the `rtk_btusb` module. This is due to the 1-11:1.0 (USB ID of the dongle) not having a symlink directory in /sys/bus/usb/drivers/rtk_btusb.

Last edited by rohitman (2021-05-17 01:24:03)