In the past three months, I was lucky to use all three kinds of boards. Talk about using experience.
I used hackrf, blackrf x115, usrpb210. I didn't carefully measure the RF index of various boards. I just used them in various experiments.
Hackrf is the smallest, and I have a shell on my hand. It's my favorite place. It's easy to take out. If anyone can make a smaller hackrf, I think it should be very popular. General signal grabbing, analysis and transmission are enough. However, the bottom noise is very large and the local vibration leakage is serious. Once in an experiment with weak signal, I had to replace it with USRP. Also, half duplex, this is a serious short board.
BladeRF works well. Openbts now supports bladerf perfectly. I think it's very good. If USRP is too expensive, it's a good alternative.
By the way, the openbts project changed a lot after rangenetworks changed its CEO. On the Internet, in various meetings, the promotion is very strong. The code has been greatly modified and put on GitHub. Now the openbts5.0, GPRS service has been relatively stable.
Founder of openbts (one?) David Burgess left rangenetworks to start yatebts. The underlying code of yatebts is exactly the same as that of openbts, and it is updated synchronously. But the top of yatebts is a different story. I like the web management interface of yatebts very much.
USRP b210, no doubt it is the most expensive and best used. All kinds of compatibility, no matter gnuradio program or openbts, amarilte has no problem. The bottom noise is low, and the local vibration leakage is small. I don't think it's much more expensive than the other two. Unfortunately, it would be much more expensive to use an agent. By the way, I found that the new b210 has become a green board again. Why? The white board looks good on the blackboard.
B210 has a disadvantage that loading firmware is very slow, and the hardware initialization part of every running program is also very slow. For example, you just want to run a FFT spectrum program, hackrf, TV stick, etc., which will turn on in a swish, but b210 will wait a long time.
Once again, put the price out for your reference:
HackRF ￥2800
bladeRF x115/x40 $420 or $650
USRP B200/B210 $675 / $1100