A small change was recently made to the RF12 wireless packet driver. This is the structure of a version 1 packet:

And this is the new structure in version 2:

Small change, big implications: the 16-bit CRC now includes the SYNC2 byte.

The SYNC2 byte is actually abused a bit by the RF12 driver, because it is set to the network group. Since RFM12B modules can look for a two-byte sync pattern with a configurable second byte, this is actually quite useful. By filtering on the network group, the receiver will completely skip packets which do not start with the proper group. This greatly reduces processor load when packets for different groups are being sent around in the same area.

There may still be some false syncs, since the RFM12B continues to look for the 2-byte pattern during the entire transmission, but it reduces overhead nevertheless.

The problem with version 1 packets is that a bit error in the group byte will generate a valid packet for another group. Extending the CRC tail to include the group fixes the problem, since the CRC will no longer be valid (almost never, that is).

This change is incompatible, i.e. packets sent with one version of the driver cannot be received by the other version. To make this less of an issue, the default group has been changed from 0x50 in v1 to 0x51 in v2.

With the new v2 driver, many network groups can coexist in the same area with no interference, other than having to share the total channel bandwidth.