Are you using the onboard antenna? That only has about ten feet of range. If your board has an external antenna option you could try that. Be careful though. You have to move a tiny zero ohm resistor. In my case I just removed it and used a solder blob. It’s extremely easy to kill your board when doing this though.

Thanks for the feedback Steve. I’m using no antennas as I assumed based on info from the tutorial I had 480 meters (ish). I did try about 25 feet away and you are right. It does not work. Huge disappointment as I based the entire project on esp32 Now. Since that will not work is there something that communicates using just the Wi-Fi between slaves to a master? Thanks. 

Hi Dave.

We were able to get a communication range of about 220meters in the open field as shown in the tutorial: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp-now-two-way-communication-esp32/
.
If you have walls and other obstacles in between, it is normal that the communication range will be reduced.

You can add other boards in between to forward the packets to the final board. Additionally, using a board with an external antenna can increase the communication range. Unfortunately, it is not easy to add an external antenna if the board doesn’t have an IPEX connector already.

You can also try other wireless communication protocols like LoRa, for example.

Regards,
Sara

Thank you for the feedback on this Sara. I was really surprised about the very short range for Now.
I was looking at Websockets with a local Wi-Fi router to have 5 esp32’s talking to a Master esp32 which would have ability to provide a Web page access. Would Websockets work?
By the way, you guys create great projects and I refer to them all the time.
Thanks again.
Dave

Hi.
I never tried using WebSockets that way. But, I think it should work. It is a communication protocol between a client and a server. So, you can have several ESP32 clients talking to one ESP32 server.
The communication range is limited to the Wi-Fi range.
Regards,
Sara