Reverse engineering a remote control car

I am quite interested in taking products apart and reverse engineering them and I've been thinking for some time about buying a cheap remote control car and opening it up and having a look.

I wanted to look at the signals and controls specifically so would I need a spectrum analyzer and can anyone suggest which spectrum analyzer would be suitable? What sort of price range would I be looking at?

I think right now you are lucky if you have the money there is a nice, kind of cheap spectrum analyzer (compared to others) The Rigol DSA815 unit can help you in most of the tasks you may need as a hobbist. In ebay cost NEW 1800 US dollars. I own a programable Rigol Power supply and Rigol make cheap and good quality equipment so I strongly recomend. You can also pick up an used HP analyzer for arround 1000 bucks out of cal and they weight a ton. Good luck!

A "Kentoys" brand R/C car has through hole components on a PCB. No COB (Chip On Board - Black epoxy blob circuit). It is from 2003, but easy to modify.

A scope may be of more assistance than a spectrum analyzer, the frequencies are usually marked, so the only thing to reverse engineer is the signal encoding. Once that is done, you can modify it as you wish.