Practical RF System Design

The ultimate practical resource for today's RF system design professionals
Radio frequency components and circuits form the backbone of today's mobile and satellite communications networks. Consequently, both practicing and aspiring industry professionals need to be able to solve ever more complex problems of RF design.
Blending theoretical rigor with a wealth of practical expertise, Practical RF System Design addresses a variety of complex, real-world problems that system engineers are likely to encounter in today's burgeoning communications industry with solutions that are not easily available in the existing literature. The author, an expert in the field of RF module and system design, provides powerful techniques for analyzing real RF systems, with emphasis on some that are currently not well understood. Combining theoretical results and models with examples, he challenges readers to address such practical issues as:
* How standing wave ratio affects system gain
* How noise on a local oscillator will affect receiver noise figure and desensitization
* How to determine the dynamic range of a cascade from module specifications
* How phase noise affects system performance and where it comes from
* How intermodulation products (IMs) predictably change with signal amplitude, and why they sometimes change differently
An essential resource for today's RF system engineers, the text covers important topics in the areas of system noise and nonlinearity, frequency conversion, and phase noise. Along with a wealth of practical examples using MATLAB(r) and Excel, spreadsheets are available for download from an FTP Web site to help readers apply the methods outlined in this important resource.

Customer Reviews:

A mighty meaty little book with real life utility for anyone in RF

By Brett Williams - March 7, 2009

Egan's book is a splendid development from front to back of the RF receiver chain. The focus is receiver hardware performance estimation and characterization, excluding antenna and processor. In the radar textbook arena one rarely finds IP2, IP3 or spurious free dynamic range even mentioned (the subject of one of Egan's chapters). While others dedicated to mixers and amps will touch on this, Egan's book goes into great detail with numeric examples for clarity, with spread sheets for completeness and practical applicability (available at his ftp site). Sound equation development makes it easy enough to convert into MatLab scripts for analysis of just what a mess nonlinear reality is going to make for us once we do everything else right for system noise figure, up-front P1dB and filter bandwidth.

Egan writes two other books on phase lock and frequency synthesis. This reader would be delighted to see Egan update his text with a second edition in years to come (he did create a... read more

Theoretical, NOT Practical

By Simon Manley - September 17, 2012

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... read more

Good Reference for Experienced RF Engineers

By Michael Coren - May 14, 2011

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... read more

AVAILABILITY
Merchant	Format	Price
Amazon US	Paperback	$84.96 - $155.00
eBooks.com	Digital (PDF)	$155.00
BookByte	Paperback	$158.88
eCampus	Paperback	~~$154.96~~ discount!