Crowd funding sought for UK SDR basestations

The campaign, dubbed LimeNET, will launch on 27th April on Crowd Supply.

The products it intends to create are:

LimeNET Mini (pictured), an app-enabled, small cell base station aimed at residential SDR applications such as IoT.

LimeNET, a more-powerful version for carrier-class wide area network deployments.

Both use Lime’s LMS7002M field-programmable CMOS RF transceiver with two transmit and two receive chains (2×2 MIMO possible) for continuous coverage over 100kHz to 3.8GHz with 120MHz RF bandwidth, said Lime.

Plus they use a dual-core 2.7GHz Intel i7-7500U, then LimeNET Mini gets 32Gbyte of DDR4 2,133MHz DRAM and 512Gbyte of SSD storage, while the non-mini has 64Gbyte of DRAM and a 1TB SSD.

“Radio access technology for wide area networks accounts for a significant portion of the overall deployment cost,” said Lime CEO Ebrahim Bushehri. “We’re seeking to make the hardware an open-source commodity sold for a fraction of current offerings, with the real value being in the software it runs. Doing it this way would effectively turn LTE, GSM or LoRa, or even 5G, into just an app.”

Other applications foreseen include aviation transponders, utility meters, media streaming, media broadcasting, radio astronomy, radar and drone control.

Its list of standards Lime wants running on its hardware includes all regional variants of 2G, 3G and 4G cellular (plus plans for 5G); IoT protocols including LoRa, Sigfox, narrow-band (NB-IoT), LTE-M, Weightless; Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and RFID networking standards, and digital broadcasting.

The firm had an earlier crowdfunding campaign – LimeSDR.

“Supporters of the LimeSDR campaign included the UK’s biggest operator, EE, which is partnering with several universities to deliver systems, such as low-cost 4G rollouts to the remote Highlands and Islands of Scotland,” claimed Lime.

There are two app stores, already open to developers: LimeSDR App Store which is an open community, and LimeNET which is invite-only.