Comment by th0ma5

There is a duality between affordable and performance. For example, the Hack RF is pretty great and has a large frequency range and wide bandwidth for a relatively small cost. But for HF transceiving you need probably need better filtering, which has to be specific to the band and mode, amplifiers both ways, although, with transmission you probably need several stages of amplifiers and filtering in each stage as well. So all of those things would be costly and depending on what you want to do it may be better to buy a regular radio.