A long long time ago I bought a cheap pci tuner card to listen to the radio. I was able to watch tv with it out of the box but the radio didn’t work. So I patched the driver and it made it into mainline.

Fast forward today, I don’t have a machine with a pci slot anymore but still wanted to listen to airwaves again as my other stereo broke. So I took out the tuner (a tnf 9835) and cooked a simple pygtk app to control it. I looks just like what you can expect from being born from such a quick hack. After trying for a while to make the hardware i2c interface work I settled for a pure software implementation. (also, pull-ups are not optional) I got all the bit masking ops right the first time (but on the other hand that was just copy pasted from drivers/media/tuners with some small edits). It is basically a nice interface around the SN761677.

Compared with my phone the sensitivity is rather poor as it needs quite a bit of an aerial but the sound quality feels better. Alas, the latter is totally subjective.