bladerf + openbts + gsm ?

[warlock]

Hi there,

I'm new to this forum and new to the whole RF thing, I'm a software engineer, and I know absolutely nothing about signals.

I want to purchase a bladerf for the following experiment, it's an experiment because I'm not interested in giving wide coverage (something about the size of a house should be enough, and I actually want to put a strict limit to that so I don't disturb neighbors) or a perfect system, I just want to play around with GSM and understand how it works. I want to be able to play at packet level where I can see interesting stuff like GSM handshake (IMSI + IMEI), negotiationg connections and even having a "fully functional" tiny GSM network to conclude with my experiments (I might go further than that if I find any interesting applications on the way to building a GSM network).

The experiment requires that I'm able to use the 4 GSM bands (GSM-850, E-GSM-900, DCS-1800 and PCS-1900) and openBTS (for the GSM stack).
I do not have a license to use any of the GSM bands but a network operator is supporting me and could lend me a piece of the band for testing, since I don't know which band I could get, I need to be able to use all of them!

Is the bladerf suitable for this?
Hardware-wise is it able to tune into the 4 bands and do whatever it has to do to make a GSM network?
Software-wise is it compatible with openBTS, will I able to setup this network, has anybody achieved this before?
Could you point me in the right direction to build such network?

I would greatly appreciate if anybody could guide me through this since I don't know anything about it, in return, if I ever manage to do something interesting, I'll gladly document it and make it available for everybody to learn something new.

Thanks in advance.

[boodrow]

I personally would not recommend the BladeRF for the type of testing you need.

Here is what I would do if I were you: http://www.rangenetworks.com/products/p ... opment-kit

They will save you the time and headache rather than trying to get a bladerf to work with OpenBTS. There is some beta code out there that kinda works, but nothing that you would find useful. Also, its important to note that Nuand isn't really putting a lot of effort in the OpenBTS (aka RangeNetworks) code, they are focusing efforts on YateBTS which is expected to be a much better overall product line.

Good Luck.