OsmocomBB team member Andreas Eversberg has been working on a new RSSI monitor firmware application within OsmocomBB.

Using this firmware, it is possible to monitor the RSSI of individual ARFCNs or even the entire spectrum.

Depending on the hardware capabilities (e.g. Hardware/FilterReplacement), it is also possible to measure the uplink RSSI.

More details are available at rssi.bin.

The current status of this firmware is available from the "laforge/monitor" branch in git, but is expected to be merged soon into master.

As some of the readers may already know, a couple of Osmocom developers have been working on a new sub-project:  OsmocomGMR.

The primary goal of this project is to provide a reusable and clean implementation of the various layers of GMR-1.

What is GMR-1 ? Well, it stands for "GEO Mobile Radio" and it's a set of specifications describing a satellite based mobile phone network heavily inspired from GSM. One of the major commercial operators of GMR-1 technology is "Thuraya", providing coverage over Europe/Africa/Asia/Australia?.

So far the implementation focused on the lowest layers:

• Physical layer with FCCH sync and demodulation support for pi4-CBPSK and pi4-CQPSK bursts.
• Channel coding layer (scrambling/puncturing/convolutional coding/crc/interleaving/...)

And some ancillary tools to exploit those:

• A good capture tool to listen to particular ARFCN(s) and channelize them properly
• Wireshark support (BCCH only so far)

The first 'demo application' using all of the above provides functionalities similar to what airprobe is for GSM: An air interface protocol analyzer that goes all the way from capturing data off-the-air to sending packets to wireshark for analysis. Limited to BCCH only currently but this will evolve with time.

Development was mainly done by Sylvain Munaut, with help from Dimitri Stolnikov (early signal captures and his great capture tool), Harald Welte (initiating the project) and Steve Markgraf (testing different setup and antenna ideas).

If you'd like to know more, you are encourated to read the  wiki and join the  mailing list

All osmocom servers / services are now IPv6 enabled.

This means we have AAAA as well as the A records in DNS for our hostnames like bb.osmocom.org, git.osmocom.org and others.

If you experience any problems connecting to our servers, please contact  laforge@gnumonks.org with a detailed problem description.

We haven't had a functioning commit log mailinglist since mid-2009, when the revision control system of openbsc was converted from svn to git.

Especially today, with the large number of separate git repositories on  http://cgit.osmocom.org/, it is very easy to loose track of what other developers are doing.

The new mailing list 'osmocom-commitlog' (renamed from openbsc-commits) will receive updates from all repositories on git.osmocom.org.

Feel free to subscribe at  http://lists.osmocom.org/mailman/listinfo/osmocom-commitlog

We're sorry to report that there are some problems with our git repositories at the moment, resulting in 'early EOF / index-pack failed' messages when users are attempting to clone one of our repositories.

The problem has been thoroughly analyzed, but even after many hours of analysis, no solution has been found yet. Your best chance is to keep re-trying the clone, in 5-10% of the cases it will succeed.

More technical details are available at this posting to the git mailing list:  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/169909

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Today, we publicly disclose the current development version of a TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) demodulator + PHY + MAC code.

The project home page, including links to source code and mailing list is  http://tetra.osmocom.org/

After GSM and  DECT, finally yet another popular wireless communications protocol will see a Free Software implementation.

Sylvain Munaut was presenting on Wideband GSM Sniffing at the 27th annual Chaos Communication Congress, where he was using a series of four phones running OsmocomBB as a GSM packet sniffer.

The slides are available from  http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4208.en.html.

A preliminary video recording (simple dump of the stream) can be found at  from this mirror

Please note: This talk was using a lot of custom software that has not been released and is not part of OsmocomBB. For more details, read  this mailing list post by Sylvain Munaut

At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, Harald Welte and Steve Markgraf have presented on OsmocomBB.

You can find the slides linked from  http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/3952.en.html and a preliminary video recording at  this mirror

The official (cut) version of the video will be released at some later point in time.

Like in the OpenBSC case, this OsmocomBB blog is merely intended as a news feed.