Customer Reviews

NAB Engineering Handbook, Tenth Edition

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If you're in the technical side of broadcasting, this handbook should be considered as a core text for your library. It's probably the most comprehensive, up to date, and technically accurate handbook that you can buy. Only authors with a proven track record and many years of experience are invited by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) to be authors, and those submissions are peer-reviewed before being finalized.

The only down sides are first that it's heavy (if you drop it on your foot you will probably be crippled for life) and second it's not printed in color; however, the handbook comes with a CD that includes colored versions of figures and tables where the contributing authors' figures/tables were in color.

Purchasing this handbook should be a no-brainer decision if you work in broadcasting or broadcast-related technical fields. It's a valuable reference tool.

Like most modern handbooks I was expecting this book to be wide and shallow, and it certainly is, no surprises here, what I was not expecting though, is for it to be so biased, and so light on some key subjects, let me explain, the biggest disappointment and the worst bias, the compact disc shipped with the book is Windows only, I can not express how badly I felt when I noticed this, the people responsible for the sale of this book must let it be known clearly that Linux users like myself will be left out, I would have kept my money if I had known this, so much for some report around calling this work unbiased.

Another problem with this CD is that it comes with Hexalock copy protection, now the people who needs to make money from the production of this book needs to protect the contents of the CD,I can not say I disagree too much with that but again this should be made evident on the product so that all who hates such protection knows enough to leave the book alone, not all people goes around with laptops, it would be nice to copy the files so you can get them on a Netbook computer that does not have a CD-ROM drive,the last gripe concerning this CD, Hexalock does not work properly on Vista, that OS needs a patch that can be downloaded from the Hexalock website, or else the "Windows only" CD will not work on Windows Vista.


Now to the book contents: The Chapter Propagation Characteristics Of radio Waves is particularly vexing, it is written by someone who sells propagation study software, this may seem the best person to write on such subject, especially if the person in question is the engineer that actually creates the program, they are likely to master most of the techniques underlying RF propagation, one would think, but the bias in favor one's product may very well prevent such an author outputting the most favorable work to the reader, the bias is evident,intentional or not, one of the sample images shown has the company's logo on it, how is this not biased? Not one mention of the free tool called SPLAT(Signal Propagation, Loss, And Terrain analysis tool),which by the way is quite good and useful for most coverage studies, this article would best be written by an independent person, I do not think on a subject like this vague mention should be made of other propagation study software commercial or free, I think results from all the major players and good free tools should be shown, I have seen Radio World put out a comparison on most of the commercial products so this is not something that would be too difficult to do, this is supposed to be an unbiased handbook.

The chapter on radio towers is another problem, no mention of Concrete gravity types, not expecting a tower design manual, that would probably be a whole handbook to itself but at least I was expecting a little deeper discussion on such a key broadcasting subject.

The book can be of some use, if you need to get an overview of modern broadcast practices. I would advise all technical people in the broadcast industry to search for free older text on the Internet, some of which are still relevant today, old vacuum tube, antenna and radio design books for instance, when you need more modern information visit some of the manufacturers sites and look for technical notes, and compile your own reference material from these, you then supplement this with purchased books, only if you can get a good unbiased review(Very hard to get) and actually see a couple of the pages to satisfy yourself that the work may have information to the depth you like or need, you then place your order, most work after 1970 seem to be just plain nonsense, it is very likely that you can gather better information from older books and the Internet. In short Buy only if you can not find what you want from old books and the Internet.