Practical RF System Design 1st Edition

After 20 years of developing copper and fiber based communications equipment, I took a job with a wireless product company. Although not an RF designer myself, I found myself working closely with RF designers so I bought this book in order to gain some insight into the "vocabulary" of RF design. I selected this particular book because the table of contents and sample pages available from Amazon's "Look Inside!" feature showed that it addressed many of the topics that I heard the experienced RF designers I worked with talking about on a daily basis. I often heard terms like cascade analysis, noise figure, image frequencies, IP3, compression, spurious, SFDR, and phase noise, and these are all featured.This is clearly an advanced book, whose target audience includes experienced RF engineers. In its treatment of noise, for example, it doesn't tell you what causes noise, as many introductory books do, since the quantum-mechanical causes of noise are generally not something the circuit designer can control. Instead, it treats noise figure as a value you read from a component's datasheet and have to deal with and minimize as best as you can. Similarly, the book doesn't go into circuit-level detail of how to build a receiver or an RF oscillator, but instead addresses the concerns that an RF engineer would have when employing off-the-shelf RF amplifiers, oscillators, and mixers as components in a signal chain, and how to get the best performance out of them.A good portion of the text is dedicated to describing the accompanying Excel spreadsheets that are available from the publisher's FTP site. These are helpful in showing how the "theoretical" results can be applied to produce "real" numerical information that the designer can use in order to perform what-if analysis and signal chain optimization. Along with the Excel files, there were two or three MatLab files. I was able to run these without any problem using FreeMat, although I didn't try them with Octave.Not being an RF designer myself, I can't say first-hand how this book would appeal to an experienced RF engineer. For my purpose, and with my background in high-speed digital and baseband analog design, I was able to follow most of the developments in this book without having to look elsewhere for background information (the notable exception being smith charts, which I hadn't used since college). In the end, I felt this book was very helpful to the process of gaining the understanding I needed to work with RF designers. That said, no book will substitute for years of RF circuit and system design experience and the "intuition" that comes with it.

Very good condition

This book, Practical RF System Design, is seriously mis-titled. Far from being Practical, the discussions in the book are entirely theoretical. If you are thinking of purchasing this book, spend some time with the Look Inside facility on the Amazon web page to see that the book is what you expect. With the word Practical in the title, you might be anticipating something along the lines of the ARRL Handbook, with a lot of emphasis on selection of components, circuit topologies and physical construction, while theoretical background is confined to the minimum necessary to understand the operation of the circuit. If so, this book will severely disappoint you.The section on Mixers, for example, gives a thorough grounding in the maths of frequency multiplication and the generation of spurs (unwanted responses). Then it goes on to a detailed methodology for planning a receiver topology, granted RF and IF frequencies, and the impact of mixer performance figures on spurious responses. Spreadsheets and graphs show how to keep the spurs clear of the IF passband, and how to choose the performance needed from preselector and IF filters to achieve overall goals for the system. There is little, however, on mixer circuitry or even the factors guiding the choice between, for example, diode-rings in their various forms and active devices such as the common Gilbert Cell mixer. The book assumes that the designer starts with the performance data for his various components and then plunges into the design.Intermediate Frequency filters, surely a prominent topic in the minds of engineers and radio amateurs with an interest in communications receiver design, do not have a separate chapter, emerging merely as performance numbers necessary to achieve desired parameters of bandwidth and suppression of spurious responses. There is nothing on the practical strengths and limitations of different filter types, such as L-C, crystal, mechanical or SAW, in terms of their available frequency ranges, bandwidths and typical spurious responses. A reader with a sound grasp of solid-state electronics, but coming to RF design for the first time, might benefit from having it pointed out that crystal filters need to be followed by some L-C selectivity because they usually have prominent spurious responses at frequencies far distant from the passband. Or that noise figures improve when cascaded filters are distributed along the amplification chain, but that adjacent channel rejection may be compromised if strong interfering signals are encountered. This type of practical advice seems strikingly absent from the book. Perhaps it would not be missed so acutely if the word Practical were not prominent in the title.Who will enjoy and benefit from this book? Engineers who are coming to RF design from another area of electronics, and those with practical experience who need to refresh the theory they swatted for exams all those years ago and then promptly forgot, only to realize in their later careers that it really is valuable for mastery of circuit design. On the other hand, those of us who are more comfortable with a soldering iron in hand than puzzling over second-order intercepts will find this book either frustrating or baffling.

As always with this author, this is a wonderfully prepared book.Every time, it meticulously and in detail introduces standard definitions, beautifully illustrates their significance with examples, and in the context of what an RF engineer does daily and expects to verify in their measurements. Many things I was unaware of from university, and unfortunately even from my brief experience so far as an RF engineer, but this was very helpful. I appreciate that the book is not just a dull heap of collected tips and tricks, but it is truly a rare systematic exposition that serves for quick refreshment as well as for serious study and actual work. It is probably the only book that faithfully illustrates a systematic approach to solving RF systems at the block level. Fabulous!

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If you design RF systems in the real world you really need this book! I'm an RF systems engineer with 27 year of experience. And I can say that this book is worth 2 years of on-the-job experience. Egan explains the nut and bolts of how to make an RF system work. He tackles the immensely important details of noise budgets, compression points, intermods, dynamic range and a dozen other vital topics. He not only explains these issues he gives you the actual tools you need to carry out the design techniques. The spreadsheets that he uses in the book are available from the publisher website! These aren't academic subjects he's talking about they are real design techniques ready to use! This book is destined to be one of the classics, a must for every engineer's bookshelf. RF engineers do yourself a favor and get this book!