Gerry,
Good to hear from you…! It’s been awhile…Hope you’re doing well on the other side of the pond. I have a couple of comments pertaining to the LimeRFE and will give you some perspective…Keep reading…
The LimeRFE by itself working with the LimeSDR is a really well made product. It delivers on its promise of being an amp for HF, VHF, UHF and some SHF. The LimeRFE that was given to me to use as a beta really worked well for HF, albeit at about 1W to 2W tops. Mine was only made functional for HF and the V/UHF was not populated (I got a very early beta model a little more than a year ago), but I have heard reports that the LimeRFE works well up to 3 GHz, but even then you’ll only get 100mW to 500mW of power output - you have to get more gain out of the antenna you build which should get you ERPs of 1W or more depending on the gain of the antenna (unity gain antennas over isotropic will only get you 100mW to 500mW ERP). But anything below the SHF frequencies you’re guaranteed 1W at the minimum. Given all that, the station will be QRP, but I used my LimeRFE to do WSPR and was heard all over the continental US but also heard in the UK, Iceland, and parts of Spain when running the LimeSDR on SDRAngel for mod/demod support for the Lime and WSPR to mod/demod for that mode and also faking the keying to a USB comport style relay to switch the RF path between receive and transmit. It worked pretty well for what it was and you can certainly now use the Lime with SDRConsole and it has all the Lime support built right into it, too, for voice and CW. So it has its uses and it makes the Lime a useful radio for those operations. I’ve also heard of Hams using theirs on VHF 2m for voice and some 440 MHz work, too - mine did not support that being built early for HF.
On the other side, is longer term support. Right now, SDRConsole is the only real application that supports the LimeSDR and the LimeRFE together - I haven’t seen if Edouard or the other developers are doing this for SDRAngel or not. If Simon (down the road) abandons 'Console for something else then everyone is going to be tethered to the final version of Console that supported the Lime/LimeRFE and that’s it. Everyone will have to ask Simon NOT to put a ‘parking meter’ on the software because when it expires you’re dead in the water with a Lime/LimeRFE and no where to get support. About 8 months ago I sent Andrew Back a letter telling Andrew that Lime Microsystems really needed to make the next generation of the LimeSDR and make it a useful radio with the RF power built right onto the board to support 1W end to end (there are Minicircuits amplifiers that do that) and put the onus of the filtering on the User to make for HF/VHF/UHF/SHF. I also told Andrew that the communication transport layer to talk to this new Lime should be more mainstream and support the protocols that are out there for the least amount of screwing around to use it for GNURadio, and all the mainstream apps (HDSDR, SDRConsole, SDR#, etc). …I never received an answer or even a letter back telling me to go to Hell. Nothing…So it may be time to poke Andrew again. Not sure what’s happening at Lime Microsystems these days but the crew that I knew then is still on the payroll over there (Andrew, Zydrunas, etc). They’re still selling the LimeSDR and Lime Mini from what it looks like, but both are getting, as they say in the UK, ‘long in the tooth’.,It really is time for them to introduce a new radio with better capability…Until that happens, you can rest comfortably that Lime and LimeSDR are still being supported even though they are 6 year old designs and really, by consumer standards, in dire need of updating.
So that’s my analysis on it, Gerry. I continue to keep my thumb on the pulse of all this, but the whole SDR market has exploded with a variety of hardware out there from Elad to SDRPlay to Icom (705 like I own) and other major players, even with China in the mix with their sub-par offerings and incredibly bad support and the Russian Tulip and McHF knock-offs that keep surfacing. Lime is still a viable radio if you keep it in the paradigm it’s in now and can get long term support from Console…But the day will come when Lime is just another bygone SDR and something else replaces it. I’m trying hard to have Lime Microsystems reinvent the Lime…Time will tell…
73 Gerry - keep in touch,
de Marty, KN0CK
