One of the answers is cost. The chips in those radios lack usb. The USB-serial adapters are not cheap - 30c even for clones. So there’s 30c that can be cut from BOM. That’s huge when the radio sells for $20. You also need a little more circuitry around them (xtal,esd,caps), plus they consume non trivial amounts of power.
But wait it gets worse! Now that you have an interface you need to write code for it. Which is more work/time/aka $$$.
I think part of the problem is it's still difficult to find a $200 or even $1000 radio that has those features. There's a bunch of KISS TNC integration starting to happen at that price point but it's still rare and for that money you should just be able to get an IQ IO stream over USB because it's available on the uC most of the time.
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I can easily explain it.
One of the answers is cost. The chips in those radios lack usb. The USB-serial adapters are not cheap - 30c even for clones. So there’s 30c that can be cut from BOM. That’s huge when the radio sells for $20. You also need a little more circuitry around them (xtal,esd,caps), plus they consume non trivial amounts of power.
But wait it gets worse! Now that you have an interface you need to write code for it. Which is more work/time/aka $$$.
I think part of the problem is it's still difficult to find a $200 or even $1000 radio that has those features. There's a bunch of KISS TNC integration starting to happen at that price point but it's still rare and for that money you should just be able to get an IQ IO stream over USB because it's available on the uC most of the time.
Sure, but demand isn't there :(. It requires a bunch of programming/work, and for maybe couple thousand users?