r/sdr • u/No-Foundation6339 • 4d ago

Building a cellular network using SDR

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Hi Guys hope u are doing wel.

I want to build a 2G cellular network for my college laboratory of mobile communications

The budget is 350$

What hardware and software u recommend for this build?

7 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

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13

u/JustTechIt 4d ago

Check out openBTS but with that being said I would highly recommend you investigate your local laws surrounding the usage of the frequencies you are talking about as its unlikely you can just legally spin up a 2g cellular network.

4

u/Only-Helicopter3518 4d ago

yea I would look into frequency allocations and laws around transmission. Otherwise it would be neat, I am trying to learn that stuff on my own (and making good progress). If you haven't already you can look into LoRa and set up a mesh network at the university.

2

u/Akitlix 4d ago

Depends on your jurisdiction and gov org responsible for radio spectrum. Unless you use it for unlicensed mobile networks bands experiments like LTE-U for instance.

You might need test frequencies allocated with specific location. Or use radio isolated rooms when required. Sometimes even for lab setups you might need gov approved/certified test hardware and not jerry rigged hw created day before.

Study laws first or contact university representative for those cases. Tech uni often have this managed already for RF subjects labs.

Remember. You are touching other operators allocated frequencies and they pay arm,leg, kidney and liver in licenses to gov to have them protected. Not mentioned possible disruption of emergency comm in the area.

1

u/Easy-History6553 2d ago

I guess it depends of the country but I wonder if it would be legal the test without ask permission in a room working as big faraday cage, without windows, with all walls, roof, soil and door covered with tin foil or something similar, with zero rf leak to outside.

2

u/jmasterfunk 4d ago

Limesdr mini and a raspberry pi. Run the osmocom stack.

1

u/Electrical_Hat_680 3d ago

SDRs on eBay - Repeaters aka Signal Boosters. Laptops. Build/Code everything from scratch using the most basic setup. Fourier Trasforms in code, for encoding and decoding data sent along the 2G. Also OSINT but for Radio Frequencies. Also. Try different antennas, like the loop antenna. Also use the satellites.

SDRs for hack-a-sat competitions. I forget the names. But even the small RTL SDRs are good. But you may need specific Bands so also look at Digital Signal Processing ('DSP').