SMS Receiver Project
From Scratchpad
The goal of this project was to build a receiver that could display all the sms messages sent from a gsm base station. The project started very ambitiously in 2002. I was a student then and had the time, but not the money to get the hardware I needed. Now I have some better hardware, but less time, so there hasn't been much progress lately.
[edit] My first setup
For the first setup I mostly used old parts that I had at home:
- Nokia NHE-3 gsm phone
- Jumptec 486 CPU and VGA card on a PC104 motherboard (bottom)
- PC104 power supply card (center)
- PC104 FPGA card (top)
The FPGA was connected to the ADC outputs on the Nokia baseband interface IC.
I got really nice data from the Nokia, and learned a lot about GSM, but I soon realized I would never be able to control its radio and timing to the extent that I could receive whatever I wanted. The service manual that I had did not provide enough information to control the ICs and since they were ASICs I could not get any datasheets.
[edit] The current setup
My current setup consists of:
- ComBlock COM-3005 Cellular Band Receiver [1]
- Xilinx Spartan 3 Starter Kit
- Adlink PCI-7200 High Speed Digital IO card [[2]]
If I deside to do some more work on the project I think I will replace the Xilinx and Adlink boards with a ComBlock COM-1400 [3].
