Excellent write up. I'm also a software guy that experiments with hardware, so I love seeing these type of projects. How much time was spent on R&D for this? I'm sure there are plenty of reasons, but it's insane to me that something like this would cost $3k.
3K in the RF world is cheap... I've watched as more than that in chips fried with a bad reflow profile, and that was with some very very cost-efficent people.
