I'm just trying to learn! . . . Here's the program that shows up on SDRSharp. The noise floor is between -60 and -65. Notice also that I'm not writing to the fifo, yet the tx sends a carrier. Registers are set to factroy before program runs either by hard reset, or pwr on reset.
import spidev
spi = spidev.SpiDev(0,0)
spi.max_speed_hz = 2000000
rx = spi.xfer([0x81,0x0c]) #address and data
spi.close()