![]() Testing it Out A British DAB digital radio multiplex, as seen through a LimeSDR. It is this final package that makes the LimeSDR an interesting prospect, by offloading software compatibility onto the widely used abstraction layer they hope to avoid some of the pain seen with other products. There is a handy page of instructions, which in the case of Ubuntu require you to add a PPA repository for the drivers, then install the Lime Suite software and the SoapySDR abstraction layer. Here that means a copy of the latest Ubuntu distribution, but Windows and MacOS machines are also supported. The first task with any SDR will always be to install whatever software is required on the host machine. Therefore this review will be biased towards the SDR non-guru, the long-time radio enthusiast considering the LimeSDR Mini as a first transceiver. But it’s probable that while many SDR programming experts will indeed buy this board, the majority of its customers will be similarly newcomers to the art. Despite holding an amateur radio licence for over three decades I have been a relative late comer to the world of SDRs, and have not progressed beyond RTL-SDRs or simple devices using a PC soundcard for baseband. It is also evident that as your Hackaday scribe I am not an SDR extreme power user. It is evident that the LimeSDR Mini is an extremely capable board that in the hands of a real expert in SDR and FPGA programming could have the potential for great things. A couple of little 870MHz antennas are supplied with the board. Along with as the board, they supplied a pair of little rubber duck antennas for the 870 MHz band. It’s worth mentioning that there will be a laser-cut plastic case for the board, which is probably worth getting as it feels somewhat vulnerable as it is. There is a single multicolor status LED between the SMA sockets. The integrated circuits are all on the top of the board, and though they have included footprints screening cans, they are not populated. The board itself is a PCB about 33 mm x 70 mm (1,25 ” x 2.75 “), with a USB 3 plug at one end and a pair of SMA sockets at the other, one for receive and the other for transmit. We feel their pain, after all who hasn’t had pre-production boards springing faults at inconvenient moments! The laser cut case that will be available for your Mini. We were lucky enough to be sent a pre-production LimeSDR Mini for review by the MyriadRF folks - in fact we were sent two of them, after the first one proved to have a hardware fault suspected to involve a solder joint issue. (It’s now available on Kickstarter for $139.) The most interesting lower figure associated with the Mini though is its price, with the early birds snapping it up for $99 - half that of its predecessor. Chief among the changes are that there is only one receive and one transmit channel to the USB’s two each, the bandwidth of 30.72 MHz is halved, and the lower-end frequency range jumps from 100 kHz to 10 MHz. ![]() This is the latest addition to the LimeSDR range of products, an SDR transceiver and FPGA development board in a USB stick format that uses the same Lime Microsystems LMS7002M at its heart as the existing LimeSDR USB, but with a lower specification. The LimeSDR Mini’s chunky USB stick form factor.Ī new generation of budget SDRs, as typified by today’s subject the LimeSDR Mini, have brought down the price of transmitting. Transmitting has been, and still is, more expensive. Thus the budget end of the market has been the preserve of radios using the limited baseband bandwidth of an existing analogue interface such as a computer sound card, or of happy accidents in driver hacking such as the discovery that the cheap and now-ubiquitous RTL2832 chipset digital TV receivers could function as an SDR receiver. It’s also fair to say that radio enthusiasts seeking a high-performance SDR would also have to be prepared with a hefty bank balance, as some of the components required to deliver software defined radios have been rather expensive. ![]() Moving signal processing from purpose-built analogue hardware into the realm of software has opened up so many exciting possibilities in terms of what can be done both with more traditional modes of radio communication and with newer ones made possible only by the new technology. It’s fair to say that software-defined radio represents the most significant advance in affordable radio equipment that we have seen over the last decade or so.
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