A peek under the radome of 32×32 5G Active Antenna Unit
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Inside a 32×32 MIMO Antenna
Category: RF
Assembling Amphenol RRU power connectors and modifying them to work with Ericsson and Nokia RRUs.
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Huawei Baseband Cheat Sheet
Quick reference guide for the types and capacities of Huawei BBU 3900 Series cards
Importing .msi antennas radiation patterns into Atoll
After headaches importing elevation (DEM) data into Forsk Atoll, I found a better mechanism for converting them, I’d been having issues with as soon as the elevation passed 255 meters, resetting to 0 in the PNG as it didn’t understand values beyond this. I was able to open the elevation data in GlobalMapper (You can […]
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Huawei BTS3900 – MML Basics
Learning Huawei’s flavour of MML – Man Machine Language for the BTS 3900 series Macro Base Stations.
All the gear I’ve got so far for my DIY RAN Project requires -48vDC to power it up. Back to online auction websites and preso I’ve ended up with an Eltek MPSU3000, from the mid 2000s. The fellow I bought it from was even nice enough to throw a binder full of printed documentation, which […]
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DIY RAN Adventures – Antennas
Picking and validating antenna selection for the new RAN project in my lab.
Using a NanoVNA to analyse antenna performance for SDR driven Base Stations for GSM / LTE.
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GSM with Osmocom: Handovers
A look at the Handover process between Cells / BTSs in GSM using the Osmocom stack.
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GSM with Osmocom: Channel Types
When setting up the timeslots on the TRX for each BTS on your BSC, you’ll notice you have to set a channel type. So what do these acronyms mean, and how do they affect the performance of the network? GSM channels break down into one of to categories, control channels – used for signalling, and […]
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GSM with Osmocom: GPRS & Packet Data
So far we’ve focused on building a plain “2G” (voice and SMS only) network, which was all consumers expected twenty years ago. As the number of users accessing the internet through DSL, Dial Up & ISDN grew, the idea of getting this data “on the go” became more appealing. TCP/IP was becoming the dominant standard […]
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Dumb Lesson in RF Connectors
Learning a very dumb lesson in antenna selection.
So now we’ve covered the basics of what’s involved let’s get some traffic on our network. For starters we’ll need to start each of our network elements and bring up whichever BTS hardware we’re using. In order for our calls to have audio, we’ll need to set a parameter on the Media Gateway. We’ll cover […]
Quick look at cheap “Magic SIM Cards”, what they do, how they do it, and the amazing graphics they use.
Configuring YateBTS NIPC with a BladeRF Software Defined Radio
Setting up YateBTS GSM BTS in Ubuntu 18.04
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Field Test on an iPhone
Accessing the Field Testing suite on an iOS Device
Exploring the how and why of Authentication in LTE & NR networks.
Note: NextEPC the Open Source project rebranded as Open5Gs in 2019 due to a naming issue. The remaining software called NextEPC is a branch of an old version of Open5Gs. This post was written before the rebranding. I’ve been working for some time on Private LTE networks, the packet core I’m using is NextEPC, it’s […]