I was cruzing digikey and found a bunch of RF amplifers. Some of them have max powers of 28dBm( almost the FCC legal limit of 1 Watt ) yet only cost a few dollars. The problem is that they are designed for cell phones and only come in tiny little packages that arn’t very good for prototyping. It might be interesting for SFE to offer breakout boards for some of these chips. Even better, it might be interesting to put one of these things on a board with a nordic chip and antenna switch. It might not be that hard to implement frequency hopping with one of those chips and this would be much more power then is available from some of the other zigbee and such modules I’ve found.