I have a customer that has a need for a cheap signal gen to be made as cheaply as possible and also wants to generate at least a watt of RF power at 1GHz. See his email below:
"Anyway I have a need for various signal sources for doing testing on both this TPS92640/LM3406 project and others. Buying a full functioning signal generator that runs up to 1 GHz is out of the question due to cost. How about making one? Can one of you recommend some parts (preferably with eval boards available) that would allow me to generate sine waves/square/arbitrary from 1MHz to 1 GHz. I also need a way to generate some RF power at 1GHz to test my home-brewed Faraday Cage. Maybe a watt to a few watts."