The 'microwave' focus was particularly apparent when, by default, there was no reasonable way to listen in on things below about 200Mhz. (all the FM band for example). They later offered an HF mod which was to remove an inductor(coil) from the front end selector on one of the antenna inputs to give it better frequency response.
Even with the change I found a number of systems with better performance in the low bands. It isn't a deal killer but it means if you're going to be exploring the low bands you probably want an upconverter.
Such as? I'm not aware of anything in the price arena of the LimeSDR that can Tx.
You can add a down converter of course and shift spectrum where the SDR is comfortable playing into the lower bands, but if you're going to do that you might as well get the PLUTO-ADALM from Analog devices which is only $150 (I got mine on the intro deal of $99 but still).
That said the LimeSDR excels at MIMO type applications (as that really is its design target).
The official page highlights more differences: https://www.crowdsupply.com/lime-micro/limesdr-mini
This is incorrect, and it is the source of much pain. The chip that provides the ADCs and DACs, the LMS7002, has an input range of 100kHZ to 3.8Ghz but the design of the LimeSDR front end filter banks made its minimum usable frequency with decent SNR about 200Mhz[1]. Initially you couldn't even pass a tuning frequency below that through the API.
Even with the vendor/factory supplied "fix" the LimeSDR has a hard time getting below 100Mhz.
A lot of people read the chip spec and expected the card implementation to be able to do the same, they were unpleasantly surprised to find out that was not the case. Hence a lot of griping early on. On the plus side, since it was deaf to the FM band it was more sensitive to higher frequency signals. Other SDRs like the SDRPlay RSP2[2] are actually quite usable down even into the AM range (500Khz - 2Mhz) and have a notch filter for the FM band to keep it from swamping the input and eating up all the dynamic range.
[1] Firstly, we would like to highlight the fact that it is not possible to achieve optimum performance across the entire operating range of LimeSDR — all the way from 100kHz to 3.8GHz — with only a single matching network. -- https://myriadrf.org/blog/optimising-limesdr-matching-hf/
Anyway, I'm not quite sure what ESA will be able to do that Canonical couldn't. This whole app store idea for radio seems very farfetched.
”the LimeSDR Mini is a smaller, less expensive version of the original LimeSDR ... uses the same LMS7002M radio transceiver as its big sibling. The Mini has two channels instead of four, and, by popular demand, SMA connectors instead of micro U.FL connectors.”
A positive review (2016): https://myriadrf.org/blog/first-tests-limesdr-gqrx/
A negative review (2017): http://sv3exp.blogspot.com/2017/03/limesdr-review.html?m=1