In case you did not know, the letter Q in PHICH stands for "request".
Some might claim that the "Q" in "ARQ" is actually "query"; and that people who choose to expand the "Q" as "request" just have a dim view of the average person's vocabulary level.
Personally, though, I'd argue that, if you think about it, the "Q" is probably not "request" or "query", but rather just another appearance of the conventional opaque "Q" that appears in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code.
I see that it supports FDD only (no TDD) and is limited to 20MHz, so some limitations.
I see that it can do some amount of real-time decoding, which is interesting. In cell towers, a big part of the processing is done by fairly general-purpose processors, but still much more tightly integrated with the hardware than this software is.
this should work with limesdr as well.
for something cheaper, try antsdr or adalm-pluto: https://github.com/srsran/zynq_timestamping
lots of good notes here: https://www.quantulum.co.uk/blog/private-lte-with-analog-ada...
Can someone outline the architectural limitations of using a smartphone modem for such network debugging/sniffing tasks?