I found gnuradio companion to be useful for just poking around. Assuming the radio has a gnuradio compatible driver then you can do a lot of basic things like tune it around various spectra and get a feel for its sensitivity and selectivity. You can try out lots of different things quickly with it.

Lately I've been looking at front end selectors and their impact on radio performance. I have been using pysignal to process snapshots of iq data from the radio in my test setup.