Comment by dragontamer
9 hours ago
Real talk: 6 layer oshpark is cheap enough for a hobbyist and there are a bunch of 500MHz / DDR2 parts that can be laid out. Like 0.8mm pitch BGAs can fit and breakout.
So yeah. Hobbyists can go here. But here be dragons!!
Nonetheless, I continue to assert that typical hobbyists are making mistakes at 100kHz region rather than the 100MHz region.
That's fair. It's just that I have seen some hobbyists doing the most insane stuff and eventually getting it to work. Some HAMs for instance have pretty extreme skills and it is not their profession, they just do it because they like it, not because they get paid.
And in many of those cases their skills are hard capped by their budget for test gear and simulation software rather than by their actual ability. Keep in mind that until not that long ago anything above 1 G was fair game because 'nobody does anything there anyway' and so HAMs and radio astronomers were pretty much the only ones with experience in that region.