The NRF9160 is very picky when it comes to antenna’s as a heads up. I had tested 6 different antennas before I arrived on an optimal antenna out of the box that’s tuned well for the chipset.
If you’re having GPS fix issues, you’d probably want to use the GPS sample from NRF to test different antenna’s. In my case I’ve had GPS fixes the entire time still running into golioth issues with good GPS data. You may also be seeing issues due to your GPS periodic timeout being 60s, even with AGPS it takes 20-30s to get a good cold fix. Without SUPL/AGPS you’re looking at 50-60s as a good cold fix in a lot of conditions with up to 5 minutes being possible, especially moving in a vehicle (I specialize in vehicle tracking specifically with my product).
Also you’re seeing the modem come out of sleep often (every 50s or so) due to your golioth ping being 60s. The modem by default is requesting a 6s active time, which means after it sends a ping, it will wait 6s before going to RRC Idle (if granted the default PSM active time by the network, they can set this to whatever they want though). So if you send a ping -> wait 60s before another -> finish your connection/close the socket -> wait your active time to drop to RRC idle -> then 50s later you’re waking for your next ping event.
If you increase your golioth keep-alive ping you’ll see a lot less of the above with much better battery life, but it’s operating as expected from the RRC Idle/Connected states.
