Tagged: osmocom

Exploring the Limits of General Purpose SDR Devices

Back in August 2019 the Chaos Communication Camp was held in Germany. This is a 5 day conference that covers a variety of hacker topics, sometimes including SDR. At the conference Osmocom developer Harald Welte (aka @LaF0rge) presented a talk titled "The Limits of General Purpose SDR devices". The talk explains how general purpose TX capable SDRs like HackRFs and LimeSDRs have their limitations when it comes to implementing advanced communications systems like cellular base stations.

If you prefer, the talk can be watched directly on the CCC website instead of YouTube.

Why an SDR board like a USRP or LimeSDR is not a cellular base station

It's tempting to buy a SDR device like a LimeSDR or USRP family member in the expectation of operating any wireless communications system out there from pure software. In reality, however, the SDR board is really only one building block. Know the limitations and constraints of your SDR board and what you need around it to build a proper transceiver.

For many years, there's an expectation that general purpose SDR devices like the Ettus USRP families, HackRF, bladeRF, LimeSDR, etc. can implement virtually any wireless system.

While that is true in principle, it is equally important to understand the limitations and constraints.

People with deep understanding of SDR and/or wireless communications systems will likely know all of those. However, SDRs are increasingly used by software developers and IT security experts. They often acquire an SDR board without understanding that this SDR board is only one building block, but by far not enough to e.g. operate a cellular base station. After investing a lot of time, some discover that they're unable to get it to work at all, or at the very least unable to get it to work reliably. This can easily lead to frustration on both the user side, as well as on the side of the authors of software used with those SDRs.

The talk will particularly focus on using General Purpose SDRs in the context of cellular technologies from GSM to LTE. It will cover aspects such as band filters, channel filters, clock stability, harmonics as well as Rx and Tx power level calibration.

The talk contains the essence of a decade of witnessing struggling SDR users (not only) with running Osmocom software with them. Let's share that with the next generation of SDR users, to prevent them falling into the same traps.

The Limits of General Purpose SDR devices

Osmocom Now Releasing Weekly Windows Binaries for RTL-SDR and Osmo-FL2K

Osmocom is the open source team behind the RTL-SDR driver project and the Osmo-FL2K discovery. In a recent announcement they have noted that they are now publishing weekly binary builds for the RTL-SDR and Osmo-FL2K projects. This means that Windows users are now able to test the latest driver updates without having to compile them manually. Laforge writes:

While Osmocom in general is a very much Linux-centric development community, we are now finally publishing automatic weekly Windows binary builds for the most widely used Osmocom SDR related projects: rtl-sdr and osmo-fl2k.

You can find the binaries at The actual builds are done by roox who is building them using MinGW on OBS, see

The status of the osmocom binary publish job, executed once per week from now on, can be found at https://jenkins.osmocom.org/jenkins/view/All%20no%20Gerrit/job/Osmocom-OBS_MinGW_weekly_publish/

As a reminder, if you've ever enjoyed the RTL-SDR or Osmo-FL2k projects, you can thank Osmocom for bringing them to us for free by donating to them at Open Collective. The drivers are the root of all that we can do with RTL-SDR and FL2K, so it is only fair to thank them.

Osmocom now accepting Donations

Osmocom, the team behind the original RTL-SDR driver project, the Osmo-FL2K discovery, OP25, gr-osmosdr, gr-gsm and various other open source cellular phone projects is now accepting monetary donations. If you weren't already aware, it was the efforts of Antti Palosaari and Eric Fry who made the original tests on DVB-T dongles, and then Osmocom who wrote the first RTL-SDR driver and software that is still currently used in the RTL-SDR project today. If you're interested, there is a full write up on the history or RTL-SDR at the bottom of rtlsdr.org.

Recently Osmocom have begun accepting donations via Open Collective. They write

The Osmocom project (if you count its predecessor OpenBSC) have been running for close to 10 years, creating a large number of Open Source projects related to mobile communications. We have never needed nor wanted any legal entity for it. It's a pure/classic FOSS project, open to contributions from anyone.

Until today, you could only contribute in one of the following forms:

  • by writing code (bug fixes, new features, etc) and submitting it (which means you need to be a developer)
  • by writing documentation / improving the wiki
  • helping other users on the mailing lists, IRC, or in other forums
  • donating cellular equipment (which many don't have)
  • hiring a freelancer or a company to write code and contribute to Osmocom on your behalf 
  • buying products or services from companies who dedicate lots of work to Osmocom

However, we've repeatedly getting requests from some individuals who wanted to contribute to the project in an easy way, even if they are not a developer, and/or don't have time, and/or don't have the size of a budget to fund development of entire new features or sub-systems.

Today, Osmocom announces that we have joined Open Collective in order to enable you to make financial contributions, either one-off or recurring.

We'll be using the funds (if we get any!) according to our funding policy outlined at https://opencollective.com/osmocom/expenses/new# in order to pay for expenses such as hosting costs for our servers / IT infrastructure, travel funding for the annual developer conferences, etc. Any and all expenses paid from those funds will be visible on the OpenCollective website. You cannot ask for more transparency than that :)

Thanks in advance for your kind assistance!

So if you've ever enjoyed the RTL-SDR project, and how much it's improved your access to the RF spectrum, please consider donating via Open Collective or contributing back in other ways. Donations may help Osmocom to continue making new and interesting discoveries, such as Steve M's amazing FL2K-SDR discovery that was released back in April this year.