News

Over The Air is our newly-launched fortnightly round-up, bringing you the latest on topics of interest to the software defined radio community as curated by technology journalist Gareth Halfacree. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has successfully launched GOES-R, its most advanced weather monitoring satellite, and is proceeding…

LuaRadio is a lightweight, embeddable flow graph signal processing framework for SDR and as the name suggests, it is written in the Lua language. It benefits from no external hard dependencies and a binary footprint of an impressively small

Right from the outset the intention with LimeSDR has been to provide the very best performance and overall user experience, with a commitment to investing significant effort in engineering and striving to get the most out of the hardware platform. A good example of this is the USB 3.0 interface and this is provided by a Cypress FX3 microcontroller, which is available in many different variants. One option would have been to select a device with a lower throughput on the interface used to transfer samples, but that incorporates an SPI core that would have made programming the LMS7002M transceiver far simpler. However, instead a higher throughput device was selected, that doesn’t have SPI but does have I2C.

Lets get snappy! Snaps are a containerization system that makes it easy to package and distribute a complete set of dependencies and files needed for an application. As an example, several snaps are now available on the LimeNet store for the Lime Suite GUI, Pothos GUI, GQRX, and…

We’re delighted to announced that Charles Brain is the winner of the LimeSDR digital design competition, with a proposal to build an FPGA-based RF channel simulator.

Encouraged by the strength of proposals in the LimeSDR early access competition and keen to see what projects the community might build that make use of the FPGA, we’ve decided to run a second competition where this time the focus is putting the LimeSDR’s Altera Cyclone IV to good…

The competition drew to a close last week and I have to say that judging has not been easy, on account of there being no shortage of great entries, with many more proposals for uses that we'd really love to support than boards we have available at this point in time.

We've been amazed and incredibly encouraged by the achievements of those in the community who we were able to provide with early access to LimeSDR hardware; from receiving weather satellites, to running 2G and 4G cellular base stations, and even HD TV broadcasting — the uses to which it has been put in a very short period of time far exceeded our expectations.

The crowdfunding campaign may have drawn to a close — and what a fantastic result! — but work continues in the core engineering team in order to get full scale production and testing in place, and also in the community of beta testers which have early access to LimeSDR hardware.

Paired with a suitable host platform and thanks to the remote capability provided by the driver infrastructure, LimeSDR can be used as the basis of a remote radio head (RRH) that is mounted closer to the antenna, with configuration and streaming carried over an IP link to another host that is running the actual SDR application.

LoRa is a chirp-based modulation format that can operate beneath the noise floor. Its robust, low power, and low rate -- and a candidate technology for connecting the internet of things. In this blog I will cover the basics of LoRa modulation, show off the LoRa PHY blocks for Pothos, and demonstrate simple relay and client applications using a pair of LimeSDRs.

We're pleased to announce that the design and manufacturing files for the PCIe variant of the LimeSDR board have now been published to GitHub, together with the associated FPGA project.