Questions on firing up BladeRF and YateBTS

[bglod]

Glad to hear you will be using this software responsibly I don't have any personal experience with OpenBTS or YateBTS, but I have heard that YateBTS has better out-of-box support for bladeRF x40/x115 devices. Note that YateBTS requires a specific FPGA version. Take a look at the EvilSocket guide on getting YateBTS running -- it lists the "known working" versions of everything. YateBTS is working on a large overhaul that, when released, will use our libbladeRF API so this requirement will eventually go away.

For the LEDs, take a look at the HDL and schematic to see how the LEDs are connected. The over/underflow LEDs are normally "on" (no over/underflows). When they turn off, an over/underflow has occurred (bad) and you may need to reduce sample rates, especially if operating in USB 2.0 or with a slow host processor. Unfortunately, there was a mistake in the the bladeRF x40 and x115 layout in which LED1 and LED2 are in the wrong order .. so just something to be aware of when looking at the LEDs. (This could be fixed in the HDL, but it hasn't officially been done, I assume, because it would cause mismatch/confusion between the schematic and HDL).

[bglod]

When you start YateBTS, try increasing the verbosity by adding -v, -vv, or -vvv (increasing levels of verbosity) and see if it gives you better granularity on where it's hanging up.

The bladeRF wiki has an entry on getting YateBTS working in general, maybe you can look through the steps there to see if there's anything you missed by chance? It hasn't been updated in a while and it may not work, but it might have some helpful information.

https://github.com/Nuand/bladeRF/wiki/S ... he-bladeRF

The only other thing I can suggest is to ask the YateBTS folks through one of their support channels.

[bglod]

Thank you! Okay, final questions. In my original topic post I mentioned using Band 8 in order to not use real American frequencies inside America, is this the correct and ethical way of using the BladeRF or are there additional steps I should take? Any specific EARFCN numbers that you recommend?

Strictly speaking, no, because that's not an ISM band. The closest ISM band is 902 MHz to 928 MHz. E-GSM-900 covers 880 MHz to 915 MHz (uplink) and 925 MHz to 960 MHz (downlink). However, realistically, you're probably going to be fine. Just keep your gains as low as you can in order to do your research while avoiding unintentional interference.

Also, if I use a min/max attenuation power of 40, how far is that going to broadcast?

At maximum gains, you can probably cover about 1000 square feet or so, but it depends largely on the environment/topology/obstructions.

After researching sample rates, I'm still having some trouble understanding it. What is the purpose of it and what's your recommendation on its settings when I only want to broadcast inside of a single room from two phones I own?

You can sample at whatever frequency you want, but the data coding will dictate the optimum sampling rate. I'm not sure if this helps at all, but here are some discussions on this topic as it pertains to LTE:
http://lteuniversity.com/ask_the_expert ... aspx#14242
https://www.dsprelated.com/showthread/c ... 9435-1.php