GNU Radio Support for Windows

Projects Lime Suite
1

Hi,

I recently bought the LimeSDR mini v2 and want to use it to transmit and receive signals. My first thought is to use the GNU Radio plug-in from LimeSuiteNG. However, it’s always disabled if I build in Windows. Does Windows support the plug-in? Also, is there another easier way to configure the signal I transmit and receive? If I use LimeGUI, is it possible to store the output to some place in the PC? Thanks!

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  • BUILD_PLUGINS_GNURADIO, GNU Radio 3.9+ Plug-in
2

Hi,

Yes, GNU Radio install is tricky on Windows, and the external plugin build requires development files of the GNURadio and tools matching that were used to build the GNURadio itself.
LimeSuiteNG enables the plugin build if it detects GNURadio development files installed on the system.
So on Windows you can either build and install GNURadio from source, then LimeSuiteNG will detect it and will be able to build the plugin.
Or there is a work in progress that will allow LimeSuiteNG GNURadio plugin to be built and packaged for the Conda package manager based installations of GNURadio WindowsInstall - GNU Radio

Could you elaborate, what you mean by easier? If you mean not using limeGUI, then you can use the command line interface utilities, like limeConfig where you can provide the generic SDR parameters: LO, gain, sample rate, LPF…
Otherwise the configuration should be done through any other SDR application interface that provides limesuite integration.

Yes, limeGUI can save a configuration file containing the chip registers, which can be loaded later.

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3

LimeSuiteNG enables the plugin build if it detects GNURadio development files installed on the system.

I see. It may be some version issues causing GNU Radio to be undetectable on my Windows. It’s good to know that it will work.

Could you elaborate, what you mean by easier?

I mean using some other software, maybe. Or is there any instruction to explain how to transmit and store the received data to a file on my computer via limeGUI? The limeGUI is a little bit hard to use without the documentation. Thanks!

4

limeGUI is an internal engineering tools, so it was not designed for typical users and requires knowledge about the hardware.

To simply receive and transmit raw RF samples you can use the command line tools.
Configure the board, for example:
limeConfig --initialize --samplerate=10e6 --txen=1 --rxen=1 --txlo=1e9 --rxlo=1.1e9 --rxgain=20 --txgain=30 --rxlpf=10e6 --txlpf=10e6 --rxpath=LNAL --txpath=Band2
Receive samples to file. For example will receive 3 seconds of data:
limeTRX -o RFSamplesFilename --time=3000
To transmit from file:
limeTRX -i RFSamplesFilename

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