Gr-gsm with LimeSDR on ubuntu 20.04

General Discussion
1

Hi Everyone,

Am posting my blog here on how to setup gr-gsm on ubuntu20.04. This has gnuradio3.8.

Please check it out :slight_smile:

Thank You

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2

Thanks for sharing, that’s nicely written-up and I’m sure will be useful. Not sure how the gr-gsm fork you are using differs from the upstream repo? In any case, seems it is still using gr-osmosdr + SoapySDR for accessing the hardware. Which is interesting, as we encountered issues when we tried this and so created a fork which used gr-limesdr (much more direct access) instead.

However, we only updated grgsm_scanner as it was all we needed at the time.

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So does gr-gsm support transmitting now with the LimeSDR devices? Last time I checked, you could only create and connect a mobile to a base station using the USRPs.
Gr-osmosdr will not work for transmitting anyway since it does not support burst time tagging (at least not that I know of, there might be some fork out there which does support them).

4

I’m not sure to be honest. There is an open issue:

One of the gr-gsm devs was testing using gr-limesdr (from an e-mail Jan 2019):

I suspect there’s been quite a bit of work on gr-limesdr since and would be good to test this again and if there are any remaining issues, close this out. Would like to see LimeSDR Mini + gr-gsm + OsmocomBB working and imagine others would find this useful.

Tagging @Garmus in case he knows more.

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Thanks alot andrew. :slight_smile: Yes. I tried gr-gsm from MyriadRF. grgsm_scanner works awesome. <3

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@andrewback, Tx in grgsm is for creating BTS? I saw that but was pretty confused what it is.

7

No, you would do this with OsmoTRX and OsmoBTS etc. (GNU Radio not involved).

However, you can create a GSM UE (mobile) with gr-gsm + OsmocomBB. See:

http://osmocom.org/projects/osmocom-bb-sdr-phy/wiki

Looks like stream tag support was needed in gr-limesdr for the transmit side to work:

http://osmocom.org/projects/osmocom-bb-sdr-phy/wiki/Supported_SDR_hardware

Though I’m not sure what the current status is. @Garmus, could you please clarify.

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Basic stream tag support was added to gr-limesdr quite a while ago. Not entirely sure what the current status is from OsmocomBB.