Search Ebook here:


Practical RF Handbook, Fourth Edition (EDN Series for Design Engineers) 4th Edition



 PDF

Author: Ian Hickman EUR.ING BSc Hons C. Eng MIEE MIEEE

Publisher: Newnes

Genres:

Publish Date: November 30, 2006

ISBN-10: 750680393

Pages: 304

File Type: PDF

Language: English

read download

Book Preface

The Practical Radio-Frequency Handbook aims to live up to its title, as a useful vademecum and companion for all who wish to extend their familiarity with RF technology. It is hoped that it will prove of use to practising electronic engineers who wish to move into the RF design area, or who have recently done so, and to engineers, technicians, amateur radio enthusiasts, electronics hobbyists and all with an interest in electronics applied to radio frequency communications. From this, you will see that it is not intended to be a textbook in any shape or form. Nothing would have been easier than to fill it up with lengthy derivations of formulae, but readers requiring to find these should look elsewhere. Where required, formulae will be found simply stated: they are there to be used, not derived.

I have naturally concentrated on current technology but have tried to add a little interest and colour by referring to earlier developments by way of background information, where this was thought appropriate, despite the pressure on space. This pressure has meant that, given the very wide scope of the book (it covers devices, circuits, equipment, systems, radio propagation and external noise), some topics have had to be covered rather more briefly than I had originally planned. However, to assist the reader requiring more information on any given topic, useful references for further reading are included at the end of most chapters. The inclusion of descriptions of earlier developments is by no means a waste of precious space for, in addition to adding interest, these earlier techniques have a way of reappearing from time to time – especially in the current climate of deregulation. A good example of this is the super-regenerative receiver, which appeared long before the Second World War, did sterling service during that conflict, but was subsequently buried as a has-been: it is now reappearing in highly price-sensitive short-range applications such as remote garage door openers and central locking controllers.

Good RF engineers are currently at a premium, and I suspect that they always will be. The reason is partly at least to be found in the scant coverage which the topic receives in university and college courses. It is simply so much easier to teach digital topics, which furthermore – due to the rapid advances being made in the technology – have long seemed the glamorous end of the business. However, the real world is analogue, and communicating information, either in analogue or digital form, at a distance and without wires, requires the use of electromagnetic radiation. This may be RF, microwave, millimetre wave or optical and there is a whole technology associated with each. This book deals just with the RF portion of the spectrum, which in earlier editions was taken to mean the range up to 1000 MHz. Frequencies beyond this were traditionally taken as the preserve of microwave engineers (sometimes, rather unfairly, called ‘plumbers’), involving waveguides, cavity resonators and the like. But with the enormous strides in technology in recent years, particularly in miniaturized surface mount components and high frequency transistors, the domain of conventional printed circuit techniques, used at VHF and UHF, has been extended to the areas of 1.5 GHz (SOLAS, safety of life at sea, GPS and Glonas, global positioning systems), 2 GHz (PCS and DCS for mobile phones) and beyond (Bluetooth and other technologies in the 2.54 GHz ISM band for short range wireless data links). In this context, an interesting and important development is the shift of large areas of RF design, away from the circuit design team at, e.g. a mobile phone manufacturer’s laboratory, to the development facilities of integrated circuit manufacturers. Thus ASICs – application specific integrated circuits – are no longer confined to the digital field. Firms such as Analog Devices, Maxim, Philips and others are steadily introducing a stream of new products integrating more and more of the receive/transmit front end for mobile phones and the corresponding base stations. Dual band ICs, for both 900MHz and 1800 MHz bands (GSM and DCS), have appeared, and now also 3G devices – for the third generation of mobile phones. The necessary matching passive components are also widely available, such as SAW and BAW (surface acoustic- and bulk acoustic-wave) filters from manufacturers such as EPCOS (formerly Siemens/Matsushita Components), Fujitsu, Murata and others.

Due to recent developments, the whole frequency range, from a few kHz up to around 6 GHz is used for an enormous variety of services, including sound broadcasting and television, commercial, professional, government and military communications of all kinds, telemetry and telecontrol, radio telex and facsimile and amateur radio. There are specialized applications, such as short-range communications and control (e.g. radio microphones, garage door openers) whilst increasingly, RF techniques are involved in non-wireless applications. Examples are wide band cable modems, and the transmission of data with clock frequencies into the GHz range, over fibre optic cables using the FDDI (Fibre-optic digital data interchange) standard. There are also a number of more sinister applications such as ESM, ECM and ECCM (electronic surveillance measures, e.g. eavesdropping; electronic counter measures, e.g. exploitation and jamming; and electronic counter measures, e.g. jamming resistant radios using frequency hopping or direct sequence spread spectrum). Indeed, the pressure on spectrum space has never been greater than it is now and it is people with a knowledge of RF who have to design, produce, maintain and use equipment capable of working in this crowded environment. It is hoped that this book will prove useful to those engaged in these tasks.


Download Ebook Read Now File Type Upload Date
Download here Read Now PDF May 30, 2020

How to Read and Open File Type for PC ?