Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described. Generally, the described techniques performed at a user equipment (UE) provide for communicating directly with a base station using a first set of antennas and communicating indirectly with the base station (e.g., via a wireless node, a remote radio head, etc.) using a second set of antennas to fully exploit the potential capabilities of the physical antennas at the UE. For downlink communications, a UE may receive at least a subset of downlink signals from a base station via a wireless node, and, for uplink communications, the UE may transmit at least a subset of uplink signals to the base station via a wireless node. To facilitate these techniques, the UE may configure the wireless node to forward downlink signals received from the base station to the UE or to forward uplink signals received from the UE to the base station.