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Can anyone recommend a cheap & cheerful SDR that would be suitable for this kind of ISM band basic investigation?

I have not tried this yet but there seem to be really cheap USB DVB-T receivers with a particular chip from Realtek that easily allows to use them as a SDR receiver.

Maybe look here as they have a list of compatible receivers if I remember correctly? https://old.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/

Edit: compatibility list is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/wiki/compatibility

Along with links/ books/ courses to get to this basic level of understanding? My understanding of binary alone is embarrassingly limited for 20 years of coding.

SDR for engineers is an analog devices book - it's the best book on the subject I'm aware of, particularly because it teaches DSP explicitly for software defined radio.

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