For some uses, it's critical to know how long the beacon battery will last. However, it’s not possible to predict this from manufacturer expected battery life because this only pertains to when the beacon is using the default settings. Battery life depends not just on the battery capacity but also your settings such as how many channels you are using, the transmitted power and the advertising interval.

The majority of the battery power is expended in very short, few millisecond (ms) transmit pulses, in between which the beacon goes into low power sleep. This kind of electrical current can't be measured with an ammeter. We have custom in-house designed test equipment capable of real-time battery current testing. This allows us to integrate the current used over multiple advertising periods. Our test equipment captures battery use at sub 1ms precision in order to catch the pulses.

For the Beacon Power Measurement Service we set up a beacon exactly the same as yours and measure the battery use. Dividing the battery capacity by the battery use gives the expected battery life.

The testing is for one set of settings.