Open Source Mobile Communications

We're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall, the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall

This time, there's no formal presentation. However, if people are interested, laforge can report on the ISDN_at_CCC_Camp_2023 which jolly and laforge operated last month.

When: Wednesday, September 6, 2023 from 20:00 CEST

Where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall (Big Blue Button of https://franken.de/)

While many people with a long history in FOSS development have no issues at all with mailing lists as primary form of engaging with their community, they have undoubtedly fallen out of fashion in favor of various chat/messaging systems or web based forums.

In Osmocom, we've just launched an installation of the discourse forum software available at https://discourse.osmocom.org/ providing an alternative to our traditional mailing lists

We're looking forward to see whether this web-based approach will facilitate more and/or other people to engage with the Osmocom developer/contributor community.

Feel free to join and get the discussions started. If there's a need for more categories or sub-categories, just let one of the moderators know and we can help with that.

The old mailing lists will continue to remain available for those who prefer them.

As our mailing lists aren't really seeing much use, and the redmine Forums never really saw any use, I decided to try a different path and deploy an instance of the discourse forum software at https://discourse.osmocom.org/

Within this Osmocom discourse, there is a Retronetworking category, with various sub-categories for related topics such as ISDN or Teletex.

There also is a German language corner for retronetworking discussions related to activities specifically happening in Germany, and to be more accessible for German native spakers who may not be confident in their English language proficiency.

Everyone interested is invite to join our discourse.

we're happy to announce the next incarnation of OsmoDevCall.

This time, laforge will be presenting on Building wired test setups for mobile communications

Particularly in lab and test setup involving cellular technology there is often a need for wired (coaxial) connection of cellular equipment, such as connecting a number of UEs (phones/modems) with one or multiple cellular base stations. For example, this is the only way to get defined power levels and test the actual transmit power or receive sensitivity of a device. The talk will cover how to build such test setups from parts like coaxial cabling, attenuators, RF splitter/combiners, duplexers, etc.

When: Wednesday, July 19, 2023 from 20:00 CEST

Where: https://osmocom.org/OsmoDevCall (Big Blue Button of https://franken.de/)

We're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall, the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall

This time, casandro will be presenting on Teletext: A digital medium transcending a factor of 10⁶ in technical progress.

NOTE: Teletext (covered here) is the service transporting textual information alongside TV broadcast signals. It is not to be confused with the completely unrelated Teletex (subject of previous RetroNetCall)!

When: Wednesday, July 5, 2023 from 20:00 CEST

Where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall (Big Blue Button of https://franken.de/)

we're happy to announce the next incarnation of OsmoDevCall.

This time, falconia will be leading a discussion about FR/HR/EFR voice codecs in Osmocom RAN

When: Wednesday, June 21, 2023 from 20:00 CEST

Where: https://osmocom.org/OsmoDevCall (Big Blue Button of https://franken.de/)

We're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall, the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall

This time, laforge will be presenting on Teletex: Between Telex and Telefax.

Everyone knows Telefax, and most people will have heard what Telex was. Few people are aware of the designated intermediate system Teletex. It was used like a "remote type writer", where formatted pages of (monospaced) text could be entered, transmitted and printed by a remote typewriter.

When: Wednesday, June 7, 2023 from 20:00 CEST

Where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall (Big Blue Button of https://franken.de/)

We're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall, the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall

This time, tnt will be presenting part 1 of E1: The analog side.

Many of us know E1 circuits from ISDN or GSM A-bis, and are familiar with the digital side of them. Building a related E1 interface mostly uses [still] available LIU (Line Interface Unit) integrated circuits. tnt took it one step further and started to think along the lines of what if I had to do my own LIU analog circuit design?

When: Wednesday, May 3, 2023 from 20:00 CEST

Where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall (Big Blue Button of https://franken.de/)

After months of work (primarily by dexter), we're happy to have finally merged code into OsmoBSC to support GPRS/EGPRS on the Ericsson_RBS family of cellular base stations.

This means that [inexpensive] decommissioned Ericsson RBS6000 hardware (as described in Minimal_RBS_Assemblies can now not only be used for providing classic circuit-switched GSM services, but also to provide GPRS/EGPRS services.

Development of this work was made possible by yet another grant from the NLnet foundation (see also https://nlnet.nl/project/Osmocom-RBS/).

The majority of the related code lives in the OsmoBSC and OsmoPCU projects, together with libosmocore and libosmo-abis. OsmoBSC now provides a PCU socket interface (like OsmoBTS does in our normal BTS-colocated PCU), and OsmoPCU can directly open the E1 tieslots for the PDCH channels (similar to how OsmoMGW handles voice channels in E1 based BTS).

For a list of relevant commits, see https://gerrit.osmocom.org/q/topic:e1_gprs

Updates to the user manual and wiki (e.g. Ericsson_RBS2000_GPRS) should follow shortly. If you're curious to try it, you can find an example file at source:doc/examples/osmo-bsc/ericsson/osmo-bsc.dug20-rus02-1trx-1pdch-16kbps.cfg

The code has so far only been tested in our lab. Your mileage my vary. If you do try it, please feel free to report any issues you may find.

we're happy to announce the next incarnation of OsmoDevCall.

This time, laforge will be presenting on Circuit Switched Data (CSD) in GSM

CSD is the mechanism by which circuit-switched data calls can be made over classic GSM/2G (and later also UMTS/3G) networks. They resembled the modem call of circuit-switched networks, but of course no voiceband modem is involved.

For more information, see our CSD wiki page.

When: Wednesday, March 15, 2023 from 20:00 CET

Where: https://osmocom.org/OsmoDevCall (Big Blue Button of https://franken.de/)