radio card under linux

Factual Questions
1

I got sick of switching my headphones at work from between the radio and the PC, so I bought a cheap “CADET PC radio” card online form a site that ‘forgot’ to mention that this was a ISA card.

Work PC has no ISA slot, but has an XWindow server on it. I have other, older PCs available with ISA slots. Linux seems to have pretty good support for the card, and a wide variety of tuner programs. Questions:

  1. Do any of the Linux FM reciever programs do anything with the RDS data the card receives?

  2. (most important) If I set this up under linux, will I be able to run the tuner on my PC over X and have the radio sound come out my soundcard, or will the sound only come out the soundcard of the PC the radio card is plugged into?

Any other general knowledge on the subject would be appreciated.

-lv

2

OK, there’s a ‘duh’ on #2, I can just run the radio card’s line-out to my main pc’s line in with the handy included cable. Not exactly as ‘radio server’-ish as I wanted, but it’s within my physical space restrictions.

I guess I’m now down to getting suggestions for which tuner program to use, with question 1 as a caveat. Since this is a more subjunctive answer, I wouldn’t object to being moved to IMHO.

-lv

3

I got a few views, so people were interested, so I thought I’d answer my own question with the knowledge I gained from a day’s research.

  1. I was unable to find an FM receiver program that detected and used the RDS data. After trying out a half-dozen programs, I decided on “radio DJ”, who’s only problem was that it was expecting signal strength values to be about 100X what this particular card was reporting, so I had to chop off a couple 0s in the if (get_sig() > min_strength) comparison so that scan would find any stations.

  2. All the radio tuner programs do just that, tune the radio. They do no audio processing. The radio tuner card must have it’s output sent via wire to either a sound card or external speakers to hear the radio. As expected, I was able to plug it directly into my main pc’s line-in port, run rdj over an xclient session, and I’m good to go.

As another aside, this card has a really good antennae. In this building, with my regular radio, a grand total of 2 or 3 stations came in clearly. This thing is picking up a dozen, including the underpowered NPR station.

Oh, and in the configuration tips and tricks, don’t us the io=0x200 option to insmod if you’re using a modern linux. The radio-cadet.o module can read the PnP info directly.

-lv
-lv
-lv