[NLRS] FunCube

[Doug Reed]

I think the answer to the API question is that it is like the RS232
standard. "What I like about the RS-232 standard is that there are so
many of them."

I'm not writing software but from what I'm seeing, there are numerous
interfaces to the SDR hardware and each one tends to be different....
with similarities. There is no single hardware interface for SDR
software than there is a single interface for CAT software to control
radios from Kenwood, Icom or Yaesu. But that doesn't mean that you
can't find software that talks to all three brands of hardware.

I don't know that there is any one API that handles all SDR tasks from
setting the frequency to decoding the data. I specifically remember a
disagreement between the author of SDRsharp and the OsmoCom people who
wrote the RTL-SDR USB interface to the DVB-T dongle. But the SDRsharp
software has a device selection input that translates between the
hardware device driver and the software so that it can run with most
of the SDR hardware out there....

Once you get into SDRsharp, I think that it has an API that
programmers can use to "hook" into its functions. That may be why
SDRsharp is the basis for several other software packages that do
airplane and ship location and even turn it into a reasonable FM
scanner..... If you want to decode some new data format, you can hook
into the IQ output at the "audio" level and add your own
post-processing. That is how you use it for APCO25 trunking and all
the rest. You can route the SDRsharp data output to the FLdigi input
and use FLdigi to decode data types that are not included in the
base SDRsharp software.

But no, I'd have to say there is no single SDR API.....

73, Doug Reed, N0NAS.