I have had access to a limesdr, bladerf, etc. They are finicky. They're great tools, but it took me a long time to go from toy examples to doing useful things with them.
Any suggestions for where to get started? I've had one sitting for a long while as I had some ideas but I've never done anything
Putting together a gnuradio pipeline to play radio stations or whatever signals you can find is rewarding. Especially when you can get the waterfall spectrogram working
I didn't do anything useful before I had to for work, and it took 10x as long as it should have. I'd suggest just taking some known working examples for fm radio, garage door openers, etc and working through them. It'll be painful, but with enough time and effort it'll happen. And it's sort of like makefile debugging-- the first ten times you have to do it it's excruciating, but after that it turns into just another task you know how to do.
I really second that set of articles. Great introduction.
FWIW there are frontend plugins for LimeSDR that will let it work with SDR# and other standard listening applications. Gnuradio can be extremely frustrating for just basic tinkering.