[Skyy93]

I am currently learning with this book. It has a very good practical and engineering oriented guide, I would recommend it!

Also the mentioned and covered hardware is cheap to get, I am currently using a RTL-SDR from nooelec and for learning the basics you have to invest like 50 euros, which is fair IMO.

[sobakistodor]

RTL-SDR is not for beginners only, it is great cheap every day SDR with known parameters. If you know what you are doing, RTL-SDR solves 90% of your receiving tasks. It is noisy in some frequency range, it has spurious signals, it is only 8 bit, but professionals easily deal with all there things. As you learn more in radio world, RTL-SDR open new opportunities for you and will never die as a receiver. Later you will start writing your software for it to process I/Q samples.

[Skyy93]

Thank you, thats good to know! I am currently exploring how to process IQ samples. You mentioned its noisy in some frequency ranges, do you happen to know which?