Brock; I bought one of these receivers a year ago to use for LMR signal strength measurements. It is a very versatile receiver multimode receiver, It is NOT SDR however, so extracting some digital modes may require a "discriminator tap" which is well documented on various sites. As was pointed out, the lack of a serial port on the host computer will require a USB to serial "dongle-thingy". The biggest complaint by users is support of USB. That being said, I got mine working, so if you have any trouble I will give it a shot. Hope my memory serves. I did however download a whole lot of software and info. I would recommend avoiding the "BONITO" software that was often bundled with it. Mine just plain did not like their product and acted in very funny ways. I got worse than no support, very cryptic people to ask for help. Try the ICOM software to get it going and then branch out. Beware of any utilities to back up, retune or modify the firmware.