LimeSDR Quick Start
So you've received your LimeSDR board... what next? This page is intended to help you get up and running as quickly as possible.
Contents
1 Assemble the hardware
Unless you have U.FL to SMA cables for all the RF ports on the LimeSDR — and optionally a suitable case — decide which RF ports you are going to connect to.
| Label | Description |
|---|---|
| RX1_H | Channel 1 RX - frequencies above 1.5GHz |
| RX2_H | Channel 2 RX - frequencies above 1.5GHz |
| RX1_L | Channel 1 RX - frequencies below 1.5GHz |
| RX2_L | Channel 2 RX - frequencies below 1.5GHz |
| RX1_W | Channel 1 RX - wideband |
| RX2_W | Channel 2 RX - wideband |
| TX1_1 | Channel 1 TX - primary (all frequencies) |
| TX2_1 | Channel 2 TX - primary (all frequencies) |
| TX1_2 | Channel 1 TX - secondary (all frequencies) |
| TX2_2 | Channel 2 TX - secondary (all frequencies) |
Note that:
- optimal RX performance is provided by using the *_H and *_L ports with the frequency bands shown
- the secondary TX ports for each channel can be used with power amplifiers covering different bands and for loopback etc.
- which ports are used is selected in software
If you have a LimeSDR Acrylic Case see the assembly instructions.
2 Connect to your computer
Depending on which board variant you have, it will require one of the following USB 3.0 cables:
- Type A plug to Type Micro B plug
- Type A plug to A socket
3 Install Lime Suite
Lime Suite provides an SDR driver and a configuration GUI, along with numerous utilities. Support is provided for the following platforms:
- Linux (Ubuntu packages)
- Mac OS X (Homebrew)
- Windows (PothosSDR Installer)
It can be installed from source or via packages/installler. Note that a O/S driver must also be installed on Windows.
For further details see Lime Suite documentation.
4 Test
4.1 Basic operation
Low level testing of RX and TX directly via the Lime Suite GUI in LimeSDR-USB Quick Test. The loopback test described is the simplest and most direct way of confirming that you have a functioning board with appropriate USB controller firmware and FPGA gateware loaded.
4.2 SoapySDR
The Lime Suite wiki page explains how LimeUtil can be used to get a list of available devices, and SoapySDRUtil to verify that it will be available to SDR ecosystem applications via SoapySDR.
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