[Openbts-discuss] Setting up a new BTS - cannot logon + "STALE burst"

[Matthias W. <Mat...@HS...>]

Hi all!

First of all: thanks to all contributors of this project! It's really great to see this happening.

We started trying to run a GSM basestation with OpenBTS here as well. I followed the build instructions at [1] and [2] as the debian packages referenced in [3] no longer seem to be available. After trying different things phones still cannot logon to the network we are trying to run. Help is very much appreciated.

The setup:
OpenBTS is running in a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server Edition VM on a Mint host system.
The RF hardware in use is a USRP N210 with a WBX daughterboard.

Network connection via Ethernet is set up and working properly. To use the correct transceiver a symbolic link has been created to ../Transceiver52M/transceiver.
The USRP has been configured to use an external 10 MHz reference clock (adding `TRX.Reference 1` using the `rawconfig` command in the CLI). UHD warnings have been fixed by setting new socket buffer sizes, cp. [4]. When starting OpenBTS it confirms being successfully tuned and ready and also using the external clock reference.

We played around with setting the receiver gain in the appropriate range 0..10 for USRP devices using OpenBTSCLI (`devconfig GSM.Radio.RxGain 10`, etc.).
Furthermore we played around with the transmitter power (`config power ...`) and different antennas.

The network appears in our handsets but registration does not work, though Control.LUR.OpenRegistration has been temporarily configured to the wildcard `.*` to accept any. The `tmsis` table is empty.

Sipauthserve, Smqueue and asterisk are also installed but not started. This should not be necessary for first tests, am I right?

/var/log/syslog outputs "NOTICE [...] Transceiver.cpp:192:pushRadioVector: dumping STALE burst in TRX->USRP interface" - what is the meaning of a "STALE burst" and how can I avoid this or fix it?

Any hint how to proceed / debug would be helpful.

Thank you,
Matthias

[1] http://openbts.org/w/index.php/BuildInstallRun
[2] https://wush.net/trac/rangepublic/wiki/BuildInstallRun
[3] http://openbts.org/w/index.php/DebOpenBTS
[4] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2012-08/msg00248.html