It still depends on what you want to do- sniffing high speed memory busses and work in reflow ovens are still out of reach of most hackerspaces I have seen.
You can use a rework station (basically a low air speed hot air gun) and wave it around. You'll need one anyway. Maybe $100 minimum.
The biggest problem with building your own reflow oven is the conversion kit mfgrs want their profit off repacking and marking up retail parts (arduinos, SSRs, thermocouples, etc) and of course you need a donor oven (maybe $50 at walmart?) so you end up paying like $150 to bodge something together.... while over on ebay, you can get a brand new professional reflow oven shipped to you for a bit over $200 from the usual gray market sellers. Supposedly they work pretty well and I'll eventually buy one. Or maybe they're junk. If I get closer to buying one I'll research it in detail.
I've done the skillet / hot plate + pan thing. Make a sling of kapton tape (you do have kapton, right?) because otherwise you're going to melt the solder and then stand there thinking "um, ok, so now how do I remove a PCB thats too hot to pick up, and leaving it on the hot plate for 30 minutes while it cools down exceeds all sanity" Even with lead free solder paste I think its unacceptable to share hot plate with kitchen and lab. You can put the PCB on a steel spatula and the whole works on the hot plate and that works pretty well if you don't do kapton.
(edited to add and you can easily spend more than the cost of a reflow oven by trying to avoid buying a reflow oven, because a non-contact IR temp meter is a handy accessory to the hot plate technique, but if you need to "charge" the cost of a IR thermometer to the hot plate project, suddenly its cheaper to just buy an oven...)
Hand soldering SMD is very easy but slow. Faster than hand soldered thru-hole, but still pretty slow. I have done 0201 RF parts but it was not really any fun at all, the bigger stuff is much easier to hand solder. And no caffeine allowed.
I skipped out on making my own oven back in the day; results seemed spotty. I'm glad to hear they are more feasible now. I stuck with the reflow station I had access to. Nice to see those have come down in price too.
I still remember trying to do 0201 with the reflow station, accidentally blowing caps right off the board :)
Kinda. There's a huge price split depending on if you just need GPIO or if you need transceivers (serial above 1GHz). If you just need GPIO $30 is reasonable. If you need transceivers, $300 would be a bargain.
