The desired system bit error rate (BER) affects range. This is because the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver detector determines the bit error rate. Signal-to-noise ratio is determined from range. Allowing a lower BER (and a correspondingly lower SNR) allows a given system to operate over a greater range.

Receiver sensitivity

Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is a measure of receiver sensitivity. SNR is optimized with a low noise receiver front-end and an IF filter that matches the transmitted signal bandwidth plus allowable frequency error. An improvement to SNR is equal to the same increase in transmit power.