How to use the Sparkfun Si4735 Breakout board?

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
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Note -- I'm not educated in the world of electronics, but I do dabble in it often as a hobbyist...

Has anyone used the Sparkfun Si4735 Breakout board and could explain with possible examples of how they got it to work?

Purpose: I'm trying to build an AM/FM radio station (frequency) scanner using an Ardunio Duemilanove. I am using a micro-controller in order to analyze the received station data that has any form of audio and pause, displaying the results on a Graphics LCD

History: I purchased the Sparkfun Si4735 AM/FM Receiver Shield, but it seems to have major flaws working with the Si4735 library which only uses SPI mode. While I got radio stations tuned in, none of the responses made sense; local station 97.3fm was being reported as 200 from the board. There were many other irritations with this shield that I couldn't understand and since I had too many problems, I ended up purchasing the Sparkfun Si4735 Breakout board which I hoped the correct wiring and coding would correct any previous problems experienced. However, after hours of searching, reading and testing -- I've got nothing to work yet.

I think using I2C is the best method of communication as it happens to be the default anyway. I've heard nothing but bad things about using SPI with this chip. But honestly, I don't know anything about either protocol and can't tell if I'm even connecting to it correctly.

As some FYI, here are some resources I've had and read many times (unfortunately some without understanding):

Sparkfun Product Page Resources

Silicon Labs Documentation
https://www.silabs.com/products/audiovideo/amfmreceivers/Pages/Si473435.aspx

Hopefully someone is out there who can shed some light on the subject.

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I am in a similar position - I am trying to build a USB controlled multiple FM receiver unit using these receivers, with 8 tuners sharing an I2C bus, with an Arduino Uno and a sparkfun logic level shifter to get the I2C to run at 3.3V.

At this stage I'm mostly collecting lots of links and bits of libraries, so nothing working as yet - similar results with SPI, control is fine, but can't read back anything useful. I2C is more suitable for multiple devices with shared bus, but as yet I've not had any success using it.

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I believe some answers about the SI4735 can be answered at this link: GitHub - pu2clr/SI4735: SI473X Library for Arduino