compared to other radio solutions, being able to do more digital analysis on the raw signal lets you do cool things that were previously impossible

at one place, we replaced entire banks of traditional radio scanners using a single SDR

a scanner could only dial into one frequency at a time, but an SDR let us capture entire swathes of the frequency spectrum and extract concurrent streams from multiple sources simultaneously

I'd love to sit down with my Lime and end-to-end my own cell base station... one day