You’ve stumbled upon an early idea for a project to create an entirely audio driven UI to enable someone I know to get back on the air despite the modernization of our radios.

Radios used to be simple dials, a few switches, and have become very powerful and inexpensive waterfall-image-generating beautiful things. These were far more accessible to the blind.

The problem with SDR radios and tuning with waterfall widgets is that they aren’t helpful if you can’t see them.

A mouse-driven-UI makes it impossible for someone who can’t see the mouse to navigate.

My goal here is to create a piece of hardware (although any macro-pad can do) that sends custom keyboard input to be read by custom software that controls an SDR device. Ideally there will be lots of audio feedback at every step of the way utilizing text to speech, and a simple memory feature to hold onto frequently used frequencies.

Follow along for more information! I’ll be adding a way to reach out soon, but for now, just email blindSDR at blindSDR dot org for more information.

I’m looking for assistance with the code on this, I think this project might utilize existing components of GNURadio, although I’m not sold. I think it might be possible to do some useful tricks with python bindings to script this together, although it was recommended to me to look into utilizing the gqrx project as well.