Is there an IC out there that implements all, or most all, of a simple FM receiver in the VHF range? I'm interested in doing some experiments with using DTMF over the air for tele-commands and the like, and I'd like to keep the receiver electronics as simple as possible. The idea is to have a very simple receiver from which I can pipe the audio output to a DTMF decoder IC and then send signals to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi or something of that nature.
I think I may be looking for something like the TDA7000 chip but I'm not clear on what frequency range it can support. It also appears that it may be obsolete / hard to source? I seem to mostly only see ebay vendors selling these. Is there perhaps a more modern successor this this chip that I should be looking at?
This Silicon Labs chip also looks promising and the frequency range is clearly spec'd, and should work for what I want to do, but the problem is that it's only available in a surface mount QFN package, and I'm really not familiar with soldering SMT devices. Something in a good old fashioned DIP package would be great if something like that exists.
Edit: the more I look at this stuff, the more confused I get. It looks like a lot of the IC's that are out there that are billed as "RF receivers" assume you're encoding data in FSK or something, and they want to give you decoded data. Sadly, that's not what I want. I just want the audio demodulated from FM. On that front, it appears that there are "receiver" IC's that will demodulate FM and give you audio, but from what I can tell, they all expect to receive as input, an "IF" (Intermediate Frequency) of 10.7mhz or 45mhz or something... which if I'm reading this right, implies you need another circuit - a mixer - in front of the receiver to downconvert the RF.
This is starting to seem overly complicated, so I may just drop the idea of looking for an IC to do this stuff and just roll it the old fashioned way. That said, if somebody reading this can point to a nice, simple IC based way (using no more than 2 or 3 IC's preferably, 1 would be better) to go from RF -> demodulated audio, it would be appreciated.