[shabble]

What are you, Etsy? :P

He didn't fab his own silicon, package his own dies, or even machine his own connectors!

The hard (and interesting) parts are the design and testing/debugging phases. Building your own PCB to handle various RF signals at this sort of level is non-trivial in both time and money, and doesn't really gain you much.

There's no reason why it should be through-hole either, and indeed, good luck finding suitable parts in those packages. SMD manual soldering isn't particularly hard either, although time consuming. If you have a reflow or spare toaster oven, you can do it a whole lot faster too.

[sounds]

I do agree, but to be fully pedantic,

  L1 and L2 are hand-wound microwave chokes with
  very high self-resonant frequency, mounted
  perpendicular to one another and clear of the
  ground plane. Wind 14 turns, air-cored, 1mm
  inside diameter from 7cm lengths of 32swg
  enamelled copper wire. Checked with the tracking
  generator on a Marconi 2383 SA, these were good
  to 4 GHz.