LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for femtocells and more

Re:LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for ... by Veratyr on Saturday September 23, 2017 @03:10AM (#15318593)

It's nice hardware but as someone who moved to it from RTL dongles, there are a few problems:

- It's super complicated. There are an incredible number of configuration options and I don't know what most of them do. Documentation for them isn't great. Normally common settings aren't easy to find or use.

- Software support is limited. I don't believe I've ever had Gqrx working and though CubicSDR works, things like bandwidth selection in the UI are broken and I end up having to reset the board through the aforementioned complicated tools.

- As sold, it's useless for HF. You need to fiddle around with soldering/desoldering components on the board to make it do HF: https://myriadrf.org/blog/optimising-limesdr-matching-hf/

As a whole for me, it's been an unfortunately negative experience owning one. My RTL-SDR dongles and HackRF are much more useful to me because they Just Work™.

EDIT: I'm talking about the original LimeSDR. I didn't notice that this was the LimeSDR Mini, which I have no experience with.

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Re:LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for ... by yuvadam on Saturday September 23, 2017 @05:16AM (#15318920)

Not sure why you would have any software compatability problems, the LimeSDR is supported as an gr-osmosdr device via SoapySDR (and driver=lime argument)

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Re:LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for ... by makomk on Saturday September 23, 2017 @03:57AM (#15318717)

I wouldn't be surprised if this is even more constrained in terms of actual, unmodified usable frequency range since it has one RX channel with one input, as opposed to the two channels with three switchable inputs each on the original LimeSDR.

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Re:LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for ... by lysp on Saturday September 23, 2017 @04:25AM (#15318787)

For HF have you looked at the upcoming airspy HF+? DC to 31 and 60 to 260 at 18 bit.

http://airspy.com/airspy-hf-plus/

Only disadvantage is possibly the 768k max bandwidth.

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Re:LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for ... by therein on Saturday September 23, 2017 @03:50AM (#15318704)

Would you recommend BladeRF instead then?

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Re:LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for ... by stagger87 on Saturday September 23, 2017 @10:51AM (#15319985)

The Bladerf is very easy to use. Good documentation. Pre-built binaries for the firmware and PC side APIs. I've used the C API extensively on Windows. Unfortunately as with pretty much all SDRs, the RF performance is pretty bad (spurious/images/etc). IIRC it has some odd limitations on the anti-aliasing filter and was quite CPU hungry at higher tx rates. You're not going to find an SDR without quirks though.

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Re:LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for ... by seanp2k2 on Saturday September 23, 2017 @02:27PM (#15320982)

Better SDR gear is out there for a price: https://www.ettus.com/product/category/USRP-Bus-Series (these are their cheapest models)

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Re:LimeSDR Mini – An open, full-duplex, USB stick radio for ... by Veratyr on Saturday September 23, 2017 @04:10AM (#15318750)

I haven't worked with it so I honestly can't say.

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