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N78 band 5G NR recordings

In my last post about 5G NR, which was part of a series in which I analyzed the signals in a short recording of an idle srsRAN gNB, I mentioned that I had already decoded all the signals that appear in the recording, and that to move on with my 5G series I would need to make and use some more complex real world recordings next. A 5G band I’m particularly interested in is n78 (3.3 – 3.8 GHz TDD).

In my single-antenna LTE recording I’ve been talking about some MIMO signals and resorting to clever tricks to decode them with a single antenna. The computer we were using was quite capable, with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-core CPU and four spare CT2000P3PSSD8 Crucial P3 Plus 2TB NVMe drives that could be dedicated to recording. It is a pity that there isn’t a high-performance open source application to record data from a USRP to disk that just works (at least if you run it on a decently fast desktop PC).

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