About OpenLTE
Most of the questions that decide whether a radio link works come down to a handful of numbers in decibels, worked out on the back of an envelope before anyone climbs a tower. How much does the path cost you at this distance and frequency? Once the antenna gains and cable losses are counted, does the signal still land above what the receiver can hear? Is that antenna quoted in dBi or dBd, and how long do I cut the element for this band? None of it is difficult maths, but doing it in your head, with a mast rental booked and a client waiting, is exactly when a factor of ten slips through. OpenLTE was built to do that RF arithmetic for you so you can spend the effort on the design.
The site is a set of small, single-purpose calculators, each aimed at one real question an RF engineer asks. The Free-Space Path Loss Calculator gives the ideal line-of-sight loss from distance and frequency. The RF Link Budget Calculator rolls transmit power, antenna gains, and every loss into a received-power figure and a margin over sensitivity. The Antenna Gain Converter puts dBi, dBd, and a linear ratio on one scale and estimates beamwidth. The dBm to Watt Converter moves power between dBm, milliwatts, and watts. The Frequency & Wavelength Calculator turns a band into a wavelength and buildable element lengths. And the Shannon Channel Capacity Calculator reads the theoretical ceiling on a channel's data rate from its bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio.
Beyond the calculators, the blog and learn section cover radio propagation and path loss, antennas and feedlines, link planning and signal power, and wireless networks, along with the reasoning behind the numbers the tools produce. The Wireless & Radio Museum is a browsable collection of the pioneers, the antennas, the machines, and the networks that built radio, with every entry, image, and fact drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
A few things worth stating plainly. OpenLTE is an independent site, not a regulator, a manufacturer, or a licensing authority, and it is not affiliated with any vendor or standards body. It is supported by advertising, which is how the tools stay free with no account required. Every result — a path loss, a link margin, an element length, a capacity ceiling — is a general engineering estimate built on the numbers you enter and on standard formulas, not a design sign-off or regulatory clearance. Legal transmit power, spectrum rules, and safety limits are specific to your band, region, and license, so treat anything that goes on the air as a starting point and confirm it against the regulations that apply to you. If a tool looks off, or you think a calculator is missing that would help, the contact page is the place to say so.