The growing demand for higher data rates and reliable wireless connectivity has led to the increasing demand for higher data rates, and reliable wireless connectivity has prompted the exploration of new spectrum regions beyond traditional 5G bands. Among these, the FR3 band (7.125–24 GHz) stands out as a promising range that offers a balance between coverage and capacity. However, before this band can be utilized on a large scale, it is crucial to experimentally understand how 5G terrestrial signals behave and interact at these higher frequencies. This thesis focuses on designing and implementing a software-defined radio (SDR)-based heterodyne transceiver to emulate 5G-like communication within the FR3 spectrum, using the COSMOS Testbed as a controlled test environment. In this work, the SDR (USRP X310) generates intermediate frequency (IF) signals ranging from 10 MHz to 6 GHz, which are fed into the proposed heterodyne transceiver. This transceiver performs frequency up-conversion and down-conversion through a carefully designed chain of RF mixers, frequency multipliers, amplifiers, and filters to enable operation across the FR3 band. By combining the flexibility of SDR with a hardware-driven RF front-end, the system can emulate realistic 5G transmission and reception scenarios within the 10–12 GHz spectrum bands, a region of interest for future terrestrial network deployments. The developed setup was validated through laboratory measurements conducted with a spectrum analyzer in the shielded COSMOS facility, where the system achieved an average output power of +12 dBm across the FR3 frequencies. This confirms the successful realization of a tunable and coherent up-/down-conversion architecture that allows for high-frequency emulation using SDR-generated baseband signals. The same platform can later be extended for more advanced coexistence studies and interference analysis between terrestrial and satellite links. Overall, this work establishes a complete proof of concept for an SDR-based heterodyne transceiver within the FR3 spectrum. The implementation provides a flexible and reproducible foundation for future experiments focusing on 5G and Beyond-5G communication, spectrum coexistence, and studies on higher-frequency front-end designs.
Vidhitkumar Malaviya (Thu,) studied this question.