What Budget turntable should I buy?

Find a used Rega Planar 3 with a nice cartridge. It should fit easily within your price range and is as good or better than any of the tables you've listed there.

There is -right now a VPI jr,RB300,and a phono cart./ and phono stage;for a great price, used ! This will be good enough till you spend 10Xs the $$ upgrading everything else.--Then you can upgrade THIS ! No it ain't mine-- but if it were; I love shameless plugs.

I have a similar setup.

I would recommend the Rotel RQ-970BX phono preamp. It will handle mm or mc, has excellent parts quality and sounds much better than it should for $200 list (a steal). Rega has always been good value and Project offers great table/arm/cartridge combos for the money.

Needle doctor have good deal on Project turntable pre amp with MM/MC and some other accessories for $499! All the rest yoy were ready to spend, spend on good cartridge!
Check it out: http://www.needledoctor.com/showcat.cfm?catnum=27&parentcatnum=0

For the phono preamp, save some money and pick up the battery powered model that Radio Shack was selling for $25. Rechargable batteries and a charger should run another $25. Much better sounding than any of the budget preamps you are considering, though it only works with high output cartridges. If it is out of stock, there is a guy on Ebay selling them with a $20 buy it now. The model # is 42-2111 (in Canada) and I forget the US designation. It only has around 38 dB of gain, but being so quiet (DC operated) this should not be a problem as long as you run it through an active preamp line stage (not a passive one), just turn the volume a bit higher. It is called the "little rat" in the Audio Asylum forum and you will find a number of comparisons there. Far from SOTA but very musical and again as good as any $200 phono preamp that I have heard. This way you can put more money into the TT.