A method and system is disclosed for operating an in-band relay to receive and amplify an incoming radio frequency signal and forward the amplified radio frequency signal. Methods to improve isolation between receive and transmit front-ends are disclosed, enabling an increase in the amplification gain without causing oscillation. Methods for learning the impulse response of the self-interference channel, and methods to perform adaptive echo cancellation in the analog domain. In addition, methods for transmit and receive beamforming are presented that achieve two objectives: (1) Improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the relayed signal, thereby compensating for noise amplification. (2) Improve the isolation, thereby enabling to increase the relay gain without causing oscillation.