Hi, I know nothing about FPGA, integrated circuits, electronics, et cetera. I do know that it's a field my father is interested in. A little background, he's worked with NASA and the European Space Agency for the majority of his career as a software architect (as in the guy that is responsible for the programming of satellites) and he loves to do electronics in his spare time. He's recently retired, but used to run seminars for ESA's electronics club and he did few workshops on FPGA for them. I'm a commercial pilot and he's intercepted (amongst many, many interesting things) electronic (ARCAS) messages sent to my aircraft from our company using a bit of water pipe in his back yard and texts me to let me know all about it. He's also big into software defined radio if that helps...

Two years ago I contacted digikey in the States and got super lucky with a knowledgable salesperson and I bought him his first integrated FPGA board. Last year I called them up again and they were literally amazing (I can't recommend them enough) and I bought him the MAX 10 FPGA 10M50 EVAL KIT, which blew his mind that I had actually bought something he wanted - an impossible task.

I called Digikey today and they were a little at a loss to recommend any new products that weren't essentially the same.

This is where I lean heavily on the knowledge and experience of this forum and ask you to come up with any suggestions for related presents for Christmas this year. Be kind, remember I don't even know what FPGA stands for, but I respect a community that does and I simply want to put a smile on the old man's face this Christmas. ANY suggestions, precise, vague, on topic, related are all welcome.

Thank you in advance for hopefully your encouraging advice. 

JB

Here's something he might be interested in:

LimeSDR-Mini

Available here: Crowd Supply

Not only is it SDR, it's even sponsored by the ESA. A win-win :-)

Note that I haven't actually used one myself, so I don't speak from experience, just interest.