Demos done by Others

The Pi-Radio 2-ch FR3 SDR front-end kit is beeing used by many researchers around the world. In this page, we try to showcase a few examples of what other people have built. If you want to recreate their demos, we request you contact them directly. If you'd like your demo to be listed on this page, please contact us; we'd be thrilled to brag about your work.

8-channel MIMO with Howell-Applebaum Beamforming

Prof. Arjuna Madanayake's amazing group at Florida International Univeresity have taken 4 Pi-Radio 2-ch FR3 kits, and have put them together to create an 8-ch phase coherent MIMO system. This demonstrates the ability to tile together multiple Pi-Radio units phase-coherently to get larger channel counts. They have then interfaced this with the ROACH SDR and have implemented an adaptive beamforming/nullforming solution called Howell-Applebaum beamforming. You can find more details here.

Joint Communications and Sensing

Dr. Roberto Bomfin and Prof. Marwa Chafi's group at NYU - Abu Dhabi have built a prototype of joint communications and sensing (i.e., radar). They interfaced the Xilinx RFSoC 4x2 system with the Pi-Radio 2-ch FR3 front-ends, and implemented a Python-based signal processing system. This system transmits two data streams (one per TX channel). The RX side receeives two streams. By correlating the RX signals against the TX sequences, and performing spatial signal processing, their system detects the distance and angle of objects in the environment. They demonstrated this system live at the Brooklyn 6G Summit. You can find more details here.

Pi-Radio FR3 Deployment at the NSF-funded COSMOS Testbed

Ivan Seskar's group has deployed a couple of Pi-Radio FR3 SDRs at the ORBIT / COSMOS testbed at Rutgers University. Each node consists of a 2-ch USRP 2974 interfaced with a 2-ch FR3 front-end. The resulting FR3 SDRs are interfaced with a HPC cluster using 10G Ethernet. They have developed several demonstrations and tutorials that users can run remotely. The demos they have built are: 1) a basic narrowband (UHD-based) Transmitter and Monitor; 2) an analog FM Link with GNU Radio; 3) a basic OFDM Link with GNU Radio; and 4) a 5G demonstration of Amarisoft over FR3. You can find more details here.

MIMO Channel Sounding over FR3

Prof. Sundeep Rangan's group at NYU (Brooklyn) have built a frequency-hopping channel sounder in the FR3 bands. Led by PhD candidate Ali Rasteh, They interfaced the RFSoC 4x2 (or the ZCU111 in some experiments) with the Pi-Radio FR3 2-ch front-end kit, and implemented a Python-based signal processor. REST-APIs were used to control the Pi-Radio hardware for frequency-hopping. Their sounder provides the power-delay profile, as well as the angles of arrival and departure. You can find more details about their work here.

5G (OAI) Over FR3

Prof. Marco Mezzavilla (now at Politecnico di Milano) has built a 5G NR demonstration over the FR3 bands. To the best of our knowledge, this was the world's first demonstration of 5G NR over FR3. The gNB consists of a host computer interfaced to a USRP N310; the host computer runs Open Air Interface. He interfaced the USRP with the Pi-Radio front-end to extend its operation into the FR3 bands. There are two kinds of UEs: 1) the "soft UE" consists of a laptop computer (with runs the Open Air Interface UE code) interfaced with a USRP B210, which is in turn interfaced with the Pi-Radio FR3 front-end; and 2) the "hard UE" is a Sierra Wireless 5G module, interfaced with the Pi-Radio FR3 front-end. This demonstration was made at the Brooklyn 6G Summit.

OAIBox + FR3

Allbesmart is a Portuguese company that makes the OAIBOX, which is a custom-built machine that implements the 5G gNB stack based on the OAI codebase. OAIBOX is a commercial, plug-and-play product that packages OAI into a ready-to-use, end-to-end 5G research/testing platform with hardware, software, and tools aimed at making OAI much easier to deploy and use. They have interfaced the OAIBOX with the Pi-Radio FR3 front-ends to extend the gNB operation into the FR3 bands. They have also extended the soft-UE and Queectel hard-UEs into the FR3 bands using the Pi-Radio FR3 front-ends.