Dear All,
My LIMESDR mini units will ship tomorrow and I would like to get your impressions. Is it more stable than the LIMESDR in terms of RF performance? I mean spurs,harmonics, receiver sensitivity etc. I am also curious how do they perform against AD9361/64 boards.
Any Ideas?
I have both and have been Beta testing Limes for just over 2 years now. I know the traditional LimeSDR in its V1.2 Beta and V1.4 production and just acquired my Mini about 3 months ago Beta. Here is my impression:
First off - and this isn’t an RF issue, but the Lime-Mini departs from the usual MyriadRF USB driver and uses an FTDI driver instead. Without that driver installed, the Lime-Mini cannot communicate on USB 3.0 - - so be looking to install that right out of the chute. Here is the driver installation for that here (Win7 - 10) ----> https://wiki.myriadrf.org/LimeSDR-Mini_driver_installation
From an RF perspective, the major difference is the lack of HF receive capability below 10 MHz - there isn’t any. The Lime-Mini can only tune 10 MHz to 3.5 GHz (the traditional LimeSDR can tune decently from 500kHz to 3.8 GHz). I have been running the Lime-Mini from Windows and in the VHF band it has very similar performance to the LimeSDR. Here is a Youtube video that shows that ----> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWpnU46MnXA . On Linux, I ran a UDOO Advanced Card with Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful) with similar results - good receive on VHF -----> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9fIFdxezF0 .
I haven’t had a chance to record a video with transmit yet, but I can assure you that it does transmit well into the VHF band on 2m when I tested it at the house just using radios across the room. Good, clean transmit is what you can expect.
Let me know if you need anything further here - I can certainly help where I can.
73 de Marty, KN0CK
Between the 2 devices the bigger LimeSDR seems to receive signals much clearer. Strong FM broadcast signals are showing up in the VHF range so I’ll need to try to filter those out to see if it cleans things up a bit.
According to my test, LimeSDR Mini is better at 100MHz band
check this video at 2:34 is when I was receiving FM signal using LimeSDR Mini