Getting Started with OpenBTS

Chapter 2. Initial Testing and Configuration

The software and hardware should now be in place. This chapter will guide you through some initial sanity checks, functional testing, and basic configuration customization. By the end of this chapter, you will have successfully exchanged the first SMS messages and voice calls among phones over your private mobile network!

Initial State

Some of the manual steps that follow will conflict and fail if other instances of the services are already running. To make sure that nothing else is running on this system, execute the following:

$ sudo stop openbts
$ sudo stop asterisk
$ sudo stop sipauthserve
$ sudo stop smqueue

Now you can proceed to confirm connectivity at each step in the chain before running the first basic tests.

Confirm Radio Connectivity

The first thing you should verify is that the transceiver application can communicate with the radio hardware. Different vendors have different methods for accomplishing this.

Ettus Research Radios

All Ettus hardware uses the Transceiver52M binary, which was installed in /OpenBTS in the last chapter. Run it as follows to see if the hardware device is detected:

$ cd /OpenBTS
$ sudo ./transceiver
[sudo] password for openbts:
linux; GNU C++ version 4.6.3; Boost_104601; UHD_003.006.002-release

Using internal clock reference
-- Opening a USRP2/N-Series device...
-- Current recv frame size: 1472 bytes
-- Current send frame size: 1472 bytes

The example above shows a successful attempt. The transceiver can be stopped ...