Decoding a 2G GSM Base Station With A HackRF And GR-GSM (YateBTS and BladeRF Micro 2.0 xA4)

In this video, I am decoding a 2G cellular base station and analyzing it&traffic with wireshark. But how? I hear you ask, because Australia switched off all of it&2G networks all the way back in 2018, being one of the first countries to do so in the world. For good reason, too. GSM is broken and compromised in so many ways, it&difficult to fathom how it is still being used in 2022. I am running @cemaxecuter7783&amazing Linux distro called DragonOS to run a 2G GSM base station with my BladeRF transmit-capable SDR and some software called YateBTS. I have two old android smart-phones with some custom-programmed SIM cards (I have a SIM card writer) You can see these phones beginning to connect at the 1min 14sec mark. The BladeRF and smart phones are set up inside a faraday cage for the purpose of this educational video. Next, i use a software utility called grgsm_livemon to monitor the GSM850 band which uses a downlink frequency of 869.2 mHz. Once the base stations begins transmitting, you can see the data starting to flow in the console window. Just to confirm that there is in fact a GSM base station broadcasting, i use an RTL-SDR with grgsm_scanner to scan for it (bottom console window) The decoded data from grgsm_livemon is piped by default to UDP port 4729, so I am able to instruct WireShark (a network traffic analyzer) to display the decoded GSMTAP packets flowing across the base station. So, what is the purpose of all this? Well, I am led to beleive that this is how...