Multi-BTS with Osmocom and a single UmTRX

Early on in the design of UmTRX it was decided that it would be a dual-channel platform, with this being identified as supporting many target use cases and operator requirements, including:

• dual-band operation, e.g. 1800MHz for local coverage and 900MHz for longer distance
• road coverage, with a dedicated BTS and narrow beam antenna facing in each direction
• two operators on a single system, e.g. one public and one private network

Not to mention that the capacity afforded by two carriers also happens to be the sweetspot for many villages and rural installations.

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UmTRX Host Driver Major Update

Up until recently the host driver for UmTRX was provided by a Fairwaves-specific version of UHD. However, support is now available in the form of a UmTRX module that is loaded by the stock version of UHD based on UHD 003.004. Meaning that it’s now possible to use a single UHD install, together with the UmTRX module, to work with both Ettus and Fairwaves hardware. Furthermore, UmTRX is also able to benefit from updates made to the UHD mainline without porting.

New and improved features

Further updates made to the host software and accompanying firmware as part of this transition include:

• Numerous additional features for versions of UmTRX that are used in the UmSITE product line, such as the ability to control integrated power amplifiers, and sense forward and reflected RF power at their output ports;
• Support for timed commands;
• Retrieving GPS NMEA data over IP is now functional.

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Development kit seasonal sale!

For a limited time UmTRX v2.2 is available for the reduced price of $850

Up until 19th February 2015 (the Chinese New Year) it will be possible to purchase a UmTRX v2.2 complete with a power supply and coax pigtails for only $850. This offer is being made by Fairwaves in support of getting hardware into the hands of more developers, and is limited to 2 kits per individual and 10 per university.

Orders placed now should be received in January. To find out more see the blog post over on the Fairwaves website, and to place an order head over to the web shop.

UK Spectrum Licensing for Test and Development

In most parts of the world a spectrum licence is required in order to operate a mobile base station (BTS), in much the same way that a licence would be required if you wanted to set up your own radio or TV station. This is not unreasonable and, after all, a great deal of inconvenience can be caused if spectrum use is not carefully coordinated and interference leads to service outages.

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TADHack and Upcoming Events

Collaboration at TADHack 2014

The Telecom Application Developer Hackathon, or TADHack for short, took place over 6-7th June in Madrid and almost the entire Fairwaves technical team were in attendance.

For the hackathon Fairwaves engineers collaborated with Ben Klang, founder of real-time communication specialists, Mojo Lingo, and Jose de Castro of Tropo, on the development of an in-network application service called FairShare Community Mobile. This aims to alleviate the problem of mobile network saturation where resources are scarce and costs may be high — such as is often the case in developing nations — through ensuring fair use of resources by managing call duration.

The collaboration resulted in a working prototype which was demonstrated live, using a UmTRX-based BTS, and which went on to win the Geeks Without Bounds Challenge Prize.

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UmTRX Hardware Updates

v2.2 of UmTRX has gone in to manufacture and with v2.3 to follow soon after.

The Fairwaves engineering team have been hard at work updating the UmTRX hardware platform, based on feedback from customers and experiences gained with deployments in the field. The first new update is v2.2, this has just gone into manufacture and changes from v2.1 include:

• Corrected component footprint for temperature sensors
• Corrected mask-to-silk warnings around T1-1, T1-2
• Mounting holes more accurately aligned to 0.5mm grid and diameters increased to 3.2 mm
• Added extra hole between LMS at centre line of board for better mounting to heatsink
• All free space of bottom layer filled by the GND copper polygon for better heat dissipation
• Add silkscreen on the vias which are under the LMS6002D ICs to make the screen stronger
• Added one more screw in the middle of the board between LMS6002D ICs
• MCX connectors replaced by MMCX
• GND pins of SMA connectors now with thermal spokes
• Resistors R103 of LMS6002D reference voltage for ADC/DAC reduced to 51 Ohm.

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Connecting the Unconnected

Community building at Mobile World Congress

The ability to use open source in creating mobile networks is still a relatively new thing, with a reasonably small but dedicated and, more recently, rapidly growing community. Similarly, it’s still early days when it comes to industry awareness of the opportunities that this presents. And perhaps most excitingly, it is not simply a matter of cost reduction in existing markets; indeed, there are many areas of the world that are not economically viable to serve with proprietary solutions.

With the above in mind Fairwaves decided to host a drinks reception in February at the world’s largest industry event, Mobile World Congress, for those with an interest in open source in mobile telecomms, and community-owned and profitable rural cellular networks.

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UmTRX becomes OIN Licensee

The UmTRX project has signed up to become a licensee of the Open Invention Network (OIN), providing it with royalty-free access to a growing patent portfolio that covers the Linux ecosystem and includes numerous mobile technologies.

Access to the defensive portfolio affords the UmTRX project a measure of protection from the actions of patent trolls and those who would seek to attack or undermine the Linux ecosystem. We’re in great company, with founding companies including IBM, Sony and NEC, and licensees ranging from SMEs and smaller open source projects, to global tech giants and major open source projects.

Site updates

This is a just brief post to introduce a number of updates that we’ve made to the site over the last few months:

• Created a how-to for setting up a simple Osmocom-based GSM network
• Expanded the hardware setup page and added numerous photos and a diagram with UmTRX v2.1 mechanical details
• Added a high-level architecture diagram for the 4xDDC firmware

We’ve also added an architecture page on the Osmocom wiki with introductory text, and high-level and FPGA diagrams.

There are further updates in the pipeline and we hope to soon complete the migration from the old Google Code project to this site (user information) and the Osmocom wiki (developers).

Proud to be an Osmocom project

Short for Open source mobile communications, Osmocom is a family of projects that span DECT, GSM, trunked and satellite communication systems, and more — with both software implementations and hardware designs.

Since July of last year the development mailing list for UmTRX has been hosted by Osmocom, but with the documentation remaining at Google Code.

If you’ve visited this website within the last few weeks you may have noticed that we’re in the process of migrating user documentation across from Google Code, and as part of the same process we’re also moving the developer documentation across to a brand new Trac instance that Osmocom have kindly set up for us at umtrx.osmocom.org.

The migration away from Google Code is not complete just yet and improving the user documentation here and the developer docs at Osmocom is very much a work in progress. It should be noted that presently the Google Code issue tracker is still in use, but issues will be moved across to Trac within the next month or so, completing the migration.

Why Osmocom?

Osmocom is more than just somewhere to host a mailing list, wiki and issue tracker, and it is in fact central to our software strategy for UmTRX use with GSM, which involves OpenBSC, OsmoBTS and a number of other projects. Although it’s true that there isn’t a great deal of documentation available on this architecture at present, and addressing this is something that we will be making a priority.

Of course, UmTRX also supports use with OpenBTS and in theory any other GSM implementation which uses the UHD API. However, the combination of UmTRX plus Osmocom (OpenBSC and OsmoBTS etc.) provides a solution that is open from the hardware, all the way up the stack, as opposed to an “open core” solution where certain features are deemed proprietary and reserved for a commercial version of the software.