I just received my new LimeSDR Mini v2.4 board and I wanted to start with.
On Windows I was able to run SDR Console to receive and transmit, but now I want to use it on my linux machine - x86_64 Debian 11 - Bullseye (which is a bit old).
I have installed the limesuite debian packages, but since they are old they don’t work with LimeSDR Mini v2.4.
Now, I am trying to compile them from source, but I am not very sure what package I need to build, LimeSuite or LimeSuiteNG.
Reading through the wiki seems that I need LimeSuiteNG, but I also found that I can use LimeSuite release v23.11.0.
You could use either, but I’d probably suggest starting out with classic Lime Suite. There will be more applications which support it’s API, while Lime Suite NG will have been better tested with more recent boards which are only supported by this version, e.g. LimeSDR XTRX.
OK, so one thing I neglected to mention is that with classic Lime Suite the gr-limesdr blocks are in a separate repo:
There are some branches for different GR versions, but I’m not sure of the status of these. So if you wanted to use GR you may in fact be better off with Lime Suite NG, which now bundles the source/sink blocks. However, I would wait a little while as there will be a tagged release this week and this will be capable of being installed alongside classic Lime Suite, meaning that you can select which to use in applications.
With NG I believe the GR blocks have been renamed to gr-limesuite also, for consistency and again meaning that in theory you could have these and the old gr-limesdr blocks available to you and then decide which to use / switching between them and the underlying Lime Suite version. Assuming that is that said blocks are compatible with whichever version of GR you target.
Thanks Andrew,
All good so far, I am able to compile gr-lime and run some projects.
Maybe I’ll came back with further questions regarding this topic since I am a bit new in the field.
Have a nice evening!
Andrew is right about the legacy LimeSuite being a bit more stable and well supported than LimeSuiteNG. I also run a mix of Bullseye and Bookworm, and LimeSuiteNG will not even build on Bullseye due to missing dependencies which are too much trouble to get working. I’ve run LimeSuiteNG on Bookworm, but had some issues with the new API used in gr-limesdr so I’ve postponed a complete upgrade until it stabilizes a little.
Things that work for me out of the box with legacy LimeSuite:
GSM
LTE and 5G NR (srsRAN stack)
TETRA (via SoapySDR)
DMR (conventional and trunked, with gr-limesdr)
DVB-T, DVB-S2
any GNU Radio flowgraphs (3.8 and 3.10) using gr-limesdr with legacy API
Things that work for me with LimeSuiteNG:
some GNU Radio flowgraphs using the new gr-limesdr API and hardcoded device settings (antenna, gains), no timestamping
I’d personally recommend to also get the LimeRFE frontend if you can still find it (was available on Mouser at some point) because it is very flexible and supports plenty of amateur bands.
