LimeSuite Tutorial

General Discussion
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Hi All,

If it has been asked, I apologise, but I am now half blind, and I cannot see black text on a white background, and my browser wont allow my plugin to work on this forum properly, so I am kinda staring at the sun at the moment.

Í am an Ex-Military Electronics Technician - Communications. In Australia I am also an Advanced Amateur Radio Operator.

I have had my Aluminium cased LimeSDR for some time now, over a year or so.

I can see a lot of people doing a lot of various cool things with their kit on Youtube.

What I have not seen on Youtube is a full tutorial, on what every single option is in LimeSuite. If there is someone out there, who understands LimeSuite completely, I would honestly appreciate a full length video, on everything. I get a lot of whats going on, but there is a lot, that I have no clue on, and I am not about to go playing with stuff if I am going to VSWR my unit into magic smoke.

Also, if it hasn’t been addressed yet, my LimeSDR shows up as USB 2 under windows from memory, and USB 3 under Ubuntu.

Also, Snappy, am I looking in the wrong place, or have the proposed app store for LimeSDR just fizzled out or something, because I havent found anything.

Regardless, a full show and tell tutorial on LimeSuite itself would honestly be helpful, if there is one, please could someone point me to it, if not, could LMS put one together.

Also, whilst I am at it, I have tried to utilise the circuitboard to determine, which antennas belong to which RX/TX but as the unit in its Aluminium case is not numbered, I do not particularly want to wing it.

Also, I understand the requirement for extraneous power, hence the Y cables, but, has anyone developed an app yet that can be used with an android device and a power pack?

One more thing, before you have had enough of my questions but what ever happened to the proposed LMS8007 extension to 6GHz board that was on Crowd Supply. It would have allowed me to go toe to toe with my HackRF. With what, double to tripple the bandwidth. Which would be useful at Drone Racing Competitions for RF Management purposes.

Anyway, sorry to be a pain. Oh DARKMODE would be helpful. I havent checked LimeSuite in a while, but I just cannot see what I am even writing right now without special sunglasses on.

VK2WAR

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LimeSuiteGUI is really an engineering tool and there are plenty of options in there which nobody would ever have call to use unless designing their own board with an LMS7002 and e.g. fine tuning power consumption, or some other pretty niche use. Lime Suite’s origins are a standalone GUI that was used with evaluation kits for Lime Microsystems transceiver ICs, which goes to explain why the GUI is not particularly user friendly — it was designed for use by a relatively small number of specialist engineers building custom solutions…

Initially the only way to update or test LimeSDR hardware was via LimeSuiteGUI, but we quickly came to realise that this was less than ideal and the UI terrified a lot of people. Hence why LimeUtil and LimeQuickTest came about. So now LimeSuiteGUI should only really be used with LimeSDR hardware in very limited cases, such as deeply investigating certain issues, and in support of developing new applications and LimeSDR support in existing applications.

As such it’s unlikely that there will ever be a comprehensive tutorial for LimeSuiteGUI, but if you’d like to learn more about what all the manifold settings control, you can consult the LMS7002M datasheet. Generally speaking though, we’d prefer people not to use the GUI unless they have a good reason to. It’s a bit like an engineer diagnostic unit that plugs into your car’s ECU via CANbus.

It has been slow to develop for a number of reasons, but most of the applications in the LimeNET store were recently updated and there should be some progress over coming months.

There has never been a board to extend the frequency range to 6GHz, but the LMS8001 Companion extends it to 10GHz. However, the previous run sold out pretty quickly and we don’t have a date just yet for the next run.

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Thank you for responding so quickly Andrew. I am happy to scan over the datasheet, such things are not new to me. I apologise for my error, regarding the LMS8001 companion board, you are obviously right, I do recall it being 10GHz not 6. I was saving up my pennies to get one, and then when I had the cash, well, the links had gone. Never mind, its not the end of the earth, and I really hate the thought of breaking open the aluminium case anyway. Having said that, I have been holding off doing it, just to get rid of the component that screws up HF which is one of my primary focus’s. Also, there really should be screen printing on the aluminium case for the RX TX connectors. As I said before, the last thing I want to do is fry my board due to a crappy vswr.

Anyway, thank you for the explanation. It would still be nice to have some of the selections defined in a video (I am blind now, and I have trouble reading which is why video/youtube is so valuable to me)
I have trouble seeing anything white background, black text, and have to invert everything, themes, darkmode etc etc.

It would be good if someone could produce an equivalent to the HackRF Portapack.

Some sort of interfaced TFT or OLED screen circa 7 inches, that can be utilised to provide similar features, especially considering the nature of the board being both Duplex and MIMO.

Its kind of worthless to me to purchase a LimeSDR mini, just to use with my Android devices when it is the 60MHz bandwidth that I purchased the LimeSDR for.

The only thing I can think of comparable, is running something like my Udoo X86 Advanced Pro off of a High Capacity LIPO connected to something like a 10 inch touch screen running a linux box with GQRX or SDRAngel (which Ive never got workiung).

It would be nice to load up images for Lora Sigfox FemtoCells or OpenBTS etrc add a decent 10MHz reference. etc etc.

Otherwise for all its worth, I would have been better off just purchasing the PCIe version or grabbing an XTRX. 0

VK2WAR

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While not covering LimeSuiteGUI as such, we did produce a video which explores the LimeSDR/LMS7002 architecture, covering things like signal processing.

LimeNET Micro plus the Raspberry Pi Touch Screen would give you something close.

These should both work. If I remember correctly, with Gqrx you need to select a SoapySDR source and use the device string “driver=lime, soapy=0”. SDRangel I installed just the other week on a PiTop laptop and it worked fine.

Though SDRangel is probably a little resource constrained on a Raspberry Pi and would be nice to have a transmit capable, simpler/more lightweight alternative for such platforms. Speaking of which, I need to see where PiHPSDR is at, as there was an effort to add LimeSDR support.

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Cheers for the links, the laptop looks awesome, Ive been checking similar if not the same on Crowd Supply. A bit out of my budget else I would jump on it. I looked into the Lime Micro, which would be awesome, save its only draw back of a 20MHz bandwidth.

Thats why I havent gone for a LimeSDR Mini. The Mini and the Micro both have a bandwidth of 20MHz.

Now, if you are playing with anything over VHF a spectrum analysis with a bandwidth of 20MHz is really ljmiting.

The XTRX is on track, but the PCIe Mini is a pain in the butt, otherwise, Id jump on that. The entire reason I grabbed LimeSDR was for the 60MHz bandwidth.

The XTRX having a bandwidth of supposedly 160MHz is awesome. But even that is limited to what 3.8Ghz requiring dividers or what have you to read anything above that.

I guess if the HackRF was redesigned for Duplex and 2 x MIMO, I think we would have what I am looking for.