I don't know if you ever bought this stuff before, but it does make you a bit paranoid.
It is export controlled and you get all sorts of stickers on it. One box I got looks like it can work in a CIA version of that bar from 'office space' where you need to wear the pins on your shirt. Like polka dots. Pretty sure it had a 'secret' sticker on it LOL before the goo-gone came out.
How many people are really that confident that if you start buying export controlled electronic warfare equipment removed from a defense lab you won't get problems? The stickers only tell you 'electronic warfare' 'secret' and its made by the same company that designs stuff to blow up communism... I would even consider fear of that.. reasonable.. if a teenager bought that thing his parents would probably panic
sure a expert knows you can buy a weird looking tile from analog.com that does most of the same stuff (so long you know how to do every other thing they did in that equipment to actually make it equipment, not a datasheet with nice specs and a diagram), but the postal inspector might think you are arming north korea LOL
as for how to turn it on, you need to reverse engineer some of the circuits . find a power rail and then find something connected to it thats identifiable and then determine what it should be biased at to identify a plausible rail voltage. lots of work. likely a gigantic waste of time, so desolder parts from it and try making a 'simple' RF circuit (like that exists)
there might be some nice functional RF transistors there that you can try to wind coils for to make simple oscillators, since it goes on an airplane its probably not gonna be useful for anything other then airplanes (for instance, on airplanes they use 400Hz power alot of the time, which just does not make sense for terrestrial use). that whole circuit was probably reduced to be functional for only what it was designed to do in the interests of weight and reliability. And the spec might not be impressive for test equipment standards, since its meant to do something within the limited resources of an airplane.. no one thought some genius is gonna find that and turn it into something nice (i.e. test equipment is designed with scientists in mind that do creative things, but this means more buttons, modes, more failure modes, etc).
I would only save wideband amplifiers, filters or reference things that store in your lab nicely
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