School of Specs TSG RAN — the group that specifies th…Overview

TS 38.300 · version 19.3.0 · 617 clauses · Overview · 40 minutes

TSG RAN — the group that specifies the radio

TSG RAN is the part of 3GPP that writes down how a phone and a mast talk to each other over the air. It is a plenary that decides and owns documents of its own, plus six working groups that draft them: one for the signal itself, one for the radio protocols, one for the wires between the boxes, one for measurable performance, one for the tests a phone has to pass, and one that is closed. This course walks the whole group in seven chapters — who they are, how big they are, what NR actually looks like in their own overall description, how a radio feature travels from a question to a published rule, and how to follow the work yourself. Every number comes from a register built out of files on this machine, and every statement about the radio points at the clause of TS 38.300 it came from.

Start at chapter 1 Sit the final test Look at the document first

This course was written against TS 38.300 version 19.3.0, and built from a source register generated 2026-08-04.

Same subject, different depth: quick start · in depth

The document, all of it

One block per clause of TS 38.300, in the order they appear, sized by how much text the clause holds. Lit blocks are taught in this course.

Open the whole of TS 38.300 as a page

The chapters

Part 1 The group and its six rooms

  1. 1 What TSG RAN is, and why the radio gets a group of its own The plenary and its six working groups, what the plenary owns in its own right, and how much of 3GPP's paper the radio side accounts for. 5 min
  2. 2 The six working groups and the line between them What each of RAN1 to RAN6 owns, which documents mark the boundary, and how the split matches the layers of TS 38.300. 5 min
  3. 3 What the numbers say about size and output Documents, meeting paper and people counted group by group, what each measure gets wrong on its own, and where the counts stop being trustworthy. 5 min

Part 2 What the radio actually is

  1. 4 What NR actually is, in the shape its own document gives it The two kinds of base station, the three interfaces, what a base station is responsible for, and the shape of the signal — read off TS 38.300 rather than described from outside. 6 min
  2. 5 The layers a packet falls through, and the three states a device sits in The user-plane and control-plane stacks, what each of the four layer-2 sublayers does, what RRC is for, and the difference between idle, inactive and connected. 6 min

Part 3 How the work moves, and how to watch it

  1. 6 How a radio feature travels from a question to a rule Study description, study report, work item, published specification and change request — the five stages, the paper each one leaves, and what the volumes say about where the effort really goes. 6 min
  2. 7 How to follow TSG RAN yourself, and what the record will not tell you The meeting calendar, where each kind of paper is addressed, the four documents worth reading at any plenary, and the eight things this data cannot answer. 5 min

Testing yourself

Every question at once

40 questions, chapter by chapter, on one page — for revision after you have read the course.

Open all the questions

The final test

15 questions drawn across the whole course, marked at the end. 70 per cent to pass, and every miss says which chapter to go back to.

Sit the final test

What this course is built on

Chapters
7
Words written for you
7,406
Clauses covered
143 of 617
Figures from the document
135
Abbreviations
264
Published versions
62
Checked sources
1194
Sources this course cites
130

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