Knobs......

[Pigmeat]

Al, I was on Ebay last night, taking a peak through used HF equipment. I ran across a seller offering box lots of Collins knobs. They would be the perfect finishing touch to your Awesome-O 3000 SDR.

You can thank me later.

[Antennae]

Here's an idea I had that I think you'll like. 
Its buttons and knobs for your SDR.
So its a box with a generic receiver face with physical knobs, dials, readouts and buttons. It hooks up to your computer/SDR setup.  Then you assign your knobs to the different functions of the software. So the big tuning knob would do the tuning, the filter button would toggle the filter, etc...  And then you can hopefully have buttons assigned to everything so there is no need for the unholy computer mouse.  Therefore you have a PSDRI (physical software defined radio interface). 

[ChrisSmolinski]

You can actually do this with SdrDx to some extent. It allows you to use MIDI devices, so you can assign sliders, buttons, knobs, etc to all the on-screen controls.

[Antennae]

Whoa, coooool.  So the right audio mixer would work pretty good for that!