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Sun, 31 Mar 2013
Sometimes you need Wireshark to get an RF Power Amplifier running

I recently had the need for an RF Power Amplifier for the UMTS 2100 MHz band. As I didn't have a suitable amplifier at hand, I though of using one of the RF Power Amplifier modules of my Nokia Ultrasite cabinet which is a Node-B configured for UMTS 2100 MHz. The RF Power Amplifier modules in the cabinet can easily be removed, they are directly connected to the power supply line of the cabinet and they have standard RF connectors for RF In and RF Out. So it should be quite easy to operate them outside the cabinet.

Connecting power to the RF Power Amplifier module was easy, however this wasn't enough, the amplifier didn't amplify any RF although the status LED of the module was on. Also the power consumption was quite low, so obviously the actual RF Power Amplifier in the module was not yet on. I didn't want to modify the electronic inside the module so I had to find out how the module gets enabled in the cabinet.

Nearly all of the various modules in the Nokia Ultrasite cabinet are connected at the backplane to Ethernet through a hub (yes, a hub, there is no switch). This Ethernet network is mainly used for controlling the modules, fast data transfer between the modules is done somewhere else. The RF Power Amplifier module is no exception, it's connected to this control Ethernet network too. The configuration and management port of the cabinet is also an Ethernet port connected to the same control network. And because an Ethernet hub is used, all the traffic on this network can be monitored without any further tricks if you are connected to the cabinet's configuration and management port.

So I run Wireshark and captured a trace of the traffic on the cabinet's control network. I already knew the IP address of the RF Power Amplifier module from running it externally, however it only responded to a ping but no TCP or UDP port was open. (BTW, if you wonder how the module gets its IP address: depending on the slot where the module is inserted into the cabinet, different ID pins of the module are grounded. The levels on those ID pins define the MAC and IP address of the module).

From the trace I was able to find out hot it works, it's actually quite evolved:

  • First a certain UDP packet has to be send to the RF Power Amplifier module. Not just destination IP address and port have to match, also the source IP address and port have to be a specific value, if not the module just reports an ICMP error that the port is unreachable (that's the reason why I didn't find an open port during my first try).
  • This UDP package causes the module to initiate a TCP connection back to the sender, when the TCP connection is open the module sends some kind of initialization message and expects an acknowledgment.
  • Only after the TCP connection is open and properly initialized, another UDP package can be send to the module which finally turns the RF Power Amplifier inside the module on.
I am not sure why the TCP connection is necessary, so far I only found out that it is used to control the status LED of the module and to return the operational status (e.g. if a fault was detected). Over UDP it's also possible to query the serial number of the module or to tell it to periodically return RF power measurements. So as you can see, sometimes even just a "simple" thing like an RF Power Amplifier can require quite complicated interaction to run it.

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