Official bladeRF forum

Hello,

I successfully followed these instructions:

https://gist.github.com/sovietw0rm/7540c86f66e447480ee7

to use airprobe with bladerf - the only modification to those instructions was to use a different git address for 'airprobe' since the gnumonks git repo no longer exists...

Anyway, it works. I have airprobe running with my bladeRF. However, I think it is very old - the interface does not look at all like the gr-gsm tool that I see used in documentation and tutorials/examples and there is very little control over the tuning and signal.

So I think I need to follow a similar set of instructions, but with gr-gsm instead of airprobe ... but I cannot find such instructions.

Is this patch:

https://github.com/scateu/airprobe-3.7-hackrf-patch

still applicable to gr-gsm, or perhaps it is already built in ?

Does anyone know of a howto/instructions to get gr-gsm working with the bladerf ?

Thank you.

Sorry. Ignore. gr-gsm right out of the box appears to work just fine with bladeRF (at least with a modern gnuradio environment in 2015).

Not sure why I thought it wasn't working - there was no reason at all for me to patch airprobe or any of that.

Thanks.

replying to my own thread here just to give future readers additional information ...

First, kalibrate-bladerf really does not work at all. It appears to "find" all kinds of GSM towers, but really is just generating false positives. I manually scanned all of 850GSM and PCS bands and found one cingular tower and two TMobile towers (which makes sense) but kalibrate-bladerf had a long list of 7-8 "towers" ... none of them existed in real life *and* kalibrate-bladerf did not find any of the real towers.

So I would not recommend relying on kalibrate-bladerf for anything and I suspect it is not usable until rewritten or debugged.

Second, airprobe/gr-gsm, when used with bladerf, cannot tune below 925mhz. This is because there is actually a hard-coded frequency floor of 925mhz around line number 86 in the python script ... you can just edit that and change it to 800, which I did. That allowed me to tune GSM base stations in the 850GSM band.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for sharing your findings!

blrfuser wrote:So I would not recommend relying on kalibrate-bladerf for anything and I suspect it is not usable until rewritten or debugged.

I second that. I've posted one required change here on its issue tracker. There are probably many more, but I haven't reviewed or looked at this code much.

blrfuser wrote:Second, airprobe/gr-gsm, when used with bladerf, cannot tune below 925mhz. This is because there is actually a hard-coded frequency floor of 925mhz around line number 86 in the python script ... you can just edit that and change it to 800, which I did. That allowed me to tune GSM base stations in the 850GSM band.

Any chance of getting a pull request submitted for this?