Absolutely spot on. Its why my last sentence on my last post was learn to walk first. There are mountains of faulty rigs for sale or for free that will both simultaneously provide an excellent source of training material and a source of spare parts to repair others. There are no short cuts to repairing gear and "rednecking" when you're missing something you need, it always ends up in tears. My friend has a business running a trunked VHF network where he installs and runs repeaters, installs and maintains the users radios and every single time he's tried to shortcut something it has bitten him in the arse. Every. Single. Time. And as well as taking twice as long to do the job as it would've done to do it right the first time its also cost him money.
Get together the following gear and then you're set:
Dummy Load - ideally a 1kW and it wants to be oil cooled, not air cooled.
Good quality SWR/Power meter with peak hold function (must require power to work - ones that claim to show PEP but don't need power are no good for measuring SSB power output. Diamond NP-660 is a good one)
Digital multimeter
Analog multimeter (analog meters can indicate fluttering voltages, a digital one won't)
Temperature controlled soldering iron
Solder gun (for doing PL259 plugs)
Desolder tools (solder sucker, braid)
Hand tools (screwdrivers, pliers, side cutters, tweezers etc)
Oscilloscope - a 50MHz one is more than good enough.
Either a Radio Test Set like a Marconi 2955 which has several test items built into it or the following individual items:
Signal generator (only needs to be a few MHz but needs to go down to 1kHz, you're going to use it to generate TX audio)
RF volt meter
AF volt meter
RF signal generator
RF sampler with about 40dB attenuation on the sample output so you can connect your radio to your oscilloscope without blowing the nuts out of the scope input. You can build one yourself out of a few resistors and a capacitor.
That lot will get you going. As you progress you may want to add a SMD rework station to that and a spectrum analyser in the future.
