Hi, I’m a bit frustrated.
I just received a LimeSDR and am trying to get it to display a basic spectrogram of anything but literally nothing works. Here’s as far as I’ve got:
- Downloaded & installed LimeSDR driver. That worked fine.
- Installed Pothos. It installed fine.
- Run LimeSuite. It runs and has a gazillion options with basically no documentation so I have no idea where to start. I mean, look at this!
I’m pretty sure only the person who wrote this program knows what all those are. Anyway I managed to connect to the board, read the temperature and use the programming module to write the latest firmware. After a couple of crashes - it’s quite a crashy program, although that is definitely a theme here.
This is where it goes downhill. I connected antennas to all the RX inputs and went to the FFTviewer module to see if I can see anything at all. I changed the centre frequency to 100 MHz and bandwidth to 10 MHz (surely some FM?) and I get this:
That does not look right. After lots of experimentation I found that if I click “Reset” in the GUI, and then GUI–>Chip, then I get this in the FFTviewer:
That still looks totally wrong, but surely closer. Looks like maybe a gain is too high but modifying the RFE gain controls doesn’t seem to do much. Ok now maybe I’ll try some other program. I disconnect from the LimeSDR (because otherwise that seems to cause various crashes). I try running GQRX, but that just doesn’t run at all. No errors, just… nothing. Yeay. Quality software.
What about Cubic SDR? Nope this just freezes at this point:
Actually I did manage to get it to recognise the LimeSDR once, but I can’t remember how and I couldn’t work out at all how to make CubicSDR do anything useful. Soapysdrutil finds the device ok:
>soapysdrutil --find="driver=lime"
######################################################
## Soapy SDR -- the SDR abstraction library
######################################################
Win32; Microsoft Visual C++ version 14.0; Boost_106300; UHD_003.010.001.001-57-g6f87cca4
Found device 0
driver = lime
index = 0
label = USB 3.0 (LimeSDR-USB) [USB] 9062000C42615
media = USB
module = STREAM
name = USB 3.0 (LimeSDR-USB)
serial = 0009062000C42615
Ok moving on, let’s try Pothos GUI. I add the SDR Source block. It seems to do nothing for about 20 seconds. Then I get this error: PothosGui.EvalEngine: Detected evaluation thread lock-up. The evaluator will not function.
Then about 20 seconds later it seems to recover: PothosGui.EvalEngine: Evaluation thread has recovered. Perhaps a call is taking too long.
and it adds ports to the block and lists the device in its Device Args: drop-down. Shit, but whatever.
Ok I’ll add a spectrogram block. It took me a long time to discover that to actually see the spectrogram you have to go to Edit->Insert Graph Widgets->Spectrogram0. One of the least intuitive things I’ve seen in software for a while. A simple fix would be to have an ‘Insert Widget’ button on the spectrogram block if it isn’t already inserted. Or, like… a tutorial.
Anyway, I connect them up set some frequencies, aaaand I get this:
What is going on? I assume this thing is actually supposed to work and I haven’t just wasted £400.