Wireless communication with LimeNET-micro

I am wondering if it is possible to send signals from LimeNET-micro to a computer over the internet, or in some other way? If so, how? My goal is to place the LimeNET out somewhere with little to no interruptions and send the signals to my computer to do the signal processing. Or can that be done on the Lime and then be sent to my computer for it to display the results?

Yes, absolutely. In the main there are two ways of doing this:

  1. You run SoapySDRServer on the LimeNET Micro and then have an app on the remote computer which uses the SoapySDR API and SoapyRemote to access this. Tuning and gain setting controls will be sent to the LimeNET Micro, along with samples for transmit, and receive in the other direction.

  2. You run the app itself (DSP) on the LimeNET Micro and then stream audio, video or whatever over the network.

The first approach has the benefit that the remote computer can be much more powerful than the RPi CM3 in the LimeNET Micro and so could do more demanding DSP. In addition, you can more easily change the application, because it’s local. However, the downside is that even for narrowband wireless communications, the streaming of samples will use a lot of network bandwidth. Probably too much for use over an Internet connection and latency with this is likely to be problematic also.

Hence the second approach is going to be more appropriate for use over an Internet connection, where you run the signal processing on the LimeNET Micro and send back data of some sort, e.g. audio, video or a spectrum plot etc.

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Thank you! I will try the 1. way. Now I have installed SoapyRemote on the LimeNET-micro and my computer. Don’t really understand what to do with the SoapySDR API tho? What is it, and is there an installation guide? Is there a program that works good for what I want to do (GNUradio, SDRAngel)?

If you run SoapySDRServer --bind on the LimeNET Micro and then start SDRangel on the computer, it should automatically discover the LimeNET Micro provided you’re on the same LAN and SDRangel was built with Soapy support.

The SoapySDR documentation is at:

There is also a Pothosware — of which SoapySDR is part of — forum, which may be the best place to ask any questions you may have regarding the API.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pothos-users/