It’s the Friday before the final few days of the campaign, we hit 80% funding and $400,000 earlier today, and we’re still some way to go but it certainly feels like we can make it. As such, now seems like a great time to look back at achievements so far, with a look also towards the future.

So if we start by revisiting the uses for LimeSDR that we’ve shared during the campaign:

• Receiving amateur radio and weather satellites with Gqrx. A great demo courtesy of Alexandru Csete.

• Receiving and decoding Bluetooth Low Energy, courtesy of an excellent Pothos example from Josh Blum.

• HDTV broadcasting (DVB-S2) with GNU Radio. Another fantastic demo from Alex!

• RC mains switch and dual system Pothos examples, again from Josh Blum.

• LoRa transmit, receive, relay and simulation. Yet another excellent demo from Josh, that he was able to put together in impressively short order.

• LTE base station with OpenAirInterface. A compelling example of how LimeSDR can be used to support modern, high performance cellular communications.

• All-in-One Lab and GNU Octave. Highlighting how LimeSDR can also have real value in test & measurement applications, along with wireless system development.

• Vector network analyser and PiHPSDR. Making advanced RF measurement accessible and a very cool application for low cost, high performance amateur radio.

• LimeSDR Remote Radio Head. Showing how the investment in a first class driver infrastructure has paid dividends, with turnkey support for remote/distributed use.

Not a bad start and even better when you consider that work on many of these — including the Pothos LoRa examples — didn’t even start until part way through the campaign. Of course, there are many more existing applications out there that should also be compatible with minimal changes.

The current LimeSDR hardware is by no means where the story ends and one board that we are able to share details of just now is an future add-on, that when used together with one of the current LimeSDR boards (USB 3.0 or PCIe) will extended coverage all the way up to 12GHz. Based on the LMS8001 up/down converter, the design files (KiCAD) can be found on GitHub, testing will commence later this year and we’re aiming for availability by the end of March 2017.

In a recently published video Ebrahim also provides an insight into the LimeSDR roadmap, showing amongst other things, a dual-LMS7002 PCIe board that provides 4x4 MIMO.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported the campaign so far, put together great demos and helped to spread the word. It really does feel like we can make the target with your continued support and, if we do, this will only be the start of the journey!

Andrew and the LimeSDR Team