[semolino]

Could you clarify what you mean by saying it may be both unaffordable and surprisingly cheap? (Expensive but less than expensive than it could be? Expensive but of poor build quality?)

Also why would you want/need someone else to purchase it for you? Because of your country's import laws, or reasons related to privacy/anonymity?

[iamtheworstdev]

probably means - more expensive than any of us would spend on a "toy", but far cheaper than what an expert might on an industry standard version of this.

[azalemeth]

Exactly. A decent digital communication, spectrum or vector network analyser from the likes of Keysight (AKA HP or Agilent) or R&S is crazy money – many thousands.

Compared to any piece of "proper" test and measurement equipment even if Flipper 1 is $1k it's a steal, for example. Heck, the last thing I put on a grant application was a 220 GHz AWG that was something like $1.5m. Admittedly quite different from a single m2 plugin socket but a 1 GHz spectrum analyser starts at $2.4k and everything fancier is "price on application" [0].

I realise this is not the same piece of kit as Flipper One, but with the right daughter boards, hackability, and <s>graduate student</s> labour I imagine you could do a lot (I am interested in RF at <1 GHz for NMR reasons as well as electronic Larmor frequencies at ~100 GHz frequencies). Their SDR daughter boards are designed for communication but there's a whole world of academic nerds who do weird things and would love a genuinely open, hackable broadband SDR (they exist, with limitations! I have a lime SDR somewhere…)

[0] https://www.rohde-schwarz.com/us/products/test-and-measureme...