Tried playing with SDR a while back. Back then, biggest challenge was to find an appropriate hardware that can receive at various frequencies and also compatible with my Linux box.
Tried playing with SDR a while back. Back then, biggest challenge was to find an appropriate hardware that can receive at various frequencies and also compatible with my Linux box.
Hermes Lite is not _so_ expensive and decent open source project: http://hermeslite.com/
Rtlsdr are extremely cheap to start with. Then maybe Hackrf one? They're all (?) trivial to use on Linux these days.
If you want to go even a step up in the trvial to use ladder, there's the Portapack H4m project. It builds on the HackRF One and adds a screen, custom firmware (open source, extensible) into an handheld factor and lets you do a bunch of... _stuff_ without needing a computer :) Also not _that_ expensive, I got mine for about 400€ from lab401.
The HackRF has a super wide range and works great. Highly recommended.
https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/
Things have improved a lot. These days GNU Radio (via OsmoSDR) supports all the big hobbyist-price-point SDR vendors, and most of them go from ~50MHz to ~6GHz.