uncalibrated general-purpose SDRs (was Re: Balancing BTS'es for handover)

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Tomcsányi, Domonkos domi at tomcsanyi.net
Sun Jan 13 10:17:33 UTC 2019


Hi Harald,

Just a fun fact: afaik current commercial multi-purpose (2G/3G/4G) base stations use generic SDRs to accomplish support for all technologies in a compact package.
Of course those SDRs are in a completely different league in terms of accuracy, calibration and price :).

Cheers,
Domi


2019. jan. 13. dátummal, 10:30 időpontban Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org> írta:

> Hi Gullik,
> 
>> On Sat, Jan 12, 2019 at 08:22:05PM +0100, Gullik Webjorn wrote:
>> Below is a measurement on my "most distant" BTS, BTS 1. From what I see,
>> downlink is 35 dB
> 
> What do you mean by "downlink is 35dB"?  
> 
>> below uplink, which of course is natural when the MS can produce 30 dBm, and
>> the BTS which
>> 
>> in this case uses a bareback Limesdr min, can only produce 10 dBm.
> 
> If you are using a general-purpose SDR hardware you cannot expect that
> any of the signal levels written anywhere actually meany anything at
> all.  There is no absolute levels reported by SDR hardware anywhere, and
> there is no calibration of either transmit nor receiver.  This means:
> * there's no general calibration curve for the chip/board
> * there's no per-unit individual calibration curve for the unit you have
> 
> This is *very* different from a real GSM base station.  Without
> designing a calibration procedure for the above, as well as some
> mechanism to apply it in production, I don't think one can expect any of
> the readings to state anything realistic, nor expect any power control loops
> to operate.
> 
> Please don't get me wrong, general-purpose SDRs such as USRPs or LimeSDR
> are great tools for experiments in the lab.  But that's what they are -
> at least for the time being.  There is a *big* difference between a
> real-world base station and a GP-SDR board.
> 
>> the bsc parameter ms max power is set to 15 for both bts 0 and bts 1.
>> However, it seems MS output power is *much* stronger.
> 
> The 16dBm is probably the closest one can get to the 15 dBm you
> requested:
>>     L1 MS Power: 16 dBm, Timing Advance: 0
> 
> How do you establish this fact?  Did you attach a RF power meter to the
> MS output and masure the output power?
> 
> -- 
> - Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
> ============================================================================
> "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option."
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