Investigate the feasibility of using the error reporting mechanism for non-platform-specific issues

Calling setDataRate() with an invalid value does not indicate an error to the program. The program is expected to check the availableDataRates() first.

There is an error reporting facility and I think it is currently unused by the backends. The intention of the error reporting was to cover platform-specific as well as API errors. Perhaps the API can raise an error for things like setDataRate().