Digi-Key, Element14 (Farnell), RS Components and Mouser are all big suppliers that offer reasonably priced components in any volume you want. They're widely used by professional engineers for both retail and wholesale orders, as well as BOM cost estimates.
Octopart lets you compare prices across all of them (and more).
For components that you can tolerate the occasional issue with, AliExpress is also a plausible option.
Specifically for tinkering with FPGAs, I'd recommend looking into Numato. They're a small-ish business based out of India that produce cheap and cheerful FPGA boards. The products are well-made and support is great.
For the soldering station, I'd recommend just Googling "Hakko FX-888" and ponying up the US$100 or so to get one from a reputable supplier. There are cheaper products such as the YiHua 936 you can get for, say, $30 that seem similar to the Hakko on the surface, but all of them will break within 2 years while the Hakko will last many decades. If you're just getting started and don't want to drop $100, just stick to the $10 40W pencil irons and you'll be fine.
Whatever route you go, make sure to get good solder (e.g. Multicore). I used cheap DealExtreme solder for repairs back in the day, and after a couple of years all of the joints cracked and I had to re-do them. Some of the stuff had been repaired for friends and I'm sure at least some of it was binned. If you're strapped for cash, I would seriously recommend buying a cheaper soldering iron in order to get good solder.
Final thing, if you're looking for a cheap oscilloscope for getting started, check out EspoTek (disclaimer: I own the business). It's cheap and cheerful, and designed for newbies just getting into the hobby. A lot of effort has been put into the product, and it's still (semi) actively maintained on GitHub.
https://espotek.com/labrador.
Octopart lets you compare prices across all of them (and more).
For components that you can tolerate the occasional issue with, AliExpress is also a plausible option.
Specifically for tinkering with FPGAs, I'd recommend looking into Numato. They're a small-ish business based out of India that produce cheap and cheerful FPGA boards. The products are well-made and support is great.
For the soldering station, I'd recommend just Googling "Hakko FX-888" and ponying up the US$100 or so to get one from a reputable supplier. There are cheaper products such as the YiHua 936 you can get for, say, $30 that seem similar to the Hakko on the surface, but all of them will break within 2 years while the Hakko will last many decades. If you're just getting started and don't want to drop $100, just stick to the $10 40W pencil irons and you'll be fine.
Whatever route you go, make sure to get good solder (e.g. Multicore). I used cheap DealExtreme solder for repairs back in the day, and after a couple of years all of the joints cracked and I had to re-do them. Some of the stuff had been repaired for friends and I'm sure at least some of it was binned. If you're strapped for cash, I would seriously recommend buying a cheaper soldering iron in order to get good solder.
Final thing, if you're looking for a cheap oscilloscope for getting started, check out EspoTek (disclaimer: I own the business). It's cheap and cheerful, and designed for newbies just getting into the hobby. A lot of effort has been put into the product, and it's still (semi) actively maintained on GitHub.
https://espotek.com/labrador.