Customer Reviews

Essentials of RF and Microwave Grounding (Artech House Microwave Library)

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I thought this book was an excellent treatment of a variety of topics relating to RF/microwave grounding. It was very readable and didn't get too bogged down in the mathematical details in all cases -- though the background was there for those interested. In the first couple of chapters the author covers the basics and brings the reader up to speed relatively quickly using the key concepts without going into incredible detail (this is where I usually stop reading some technical books and just refer to them, in this case I read the book in the first two days I owned it).

It was particularly good to see examples of the concepts demonstrated through actual commercial circuit implementations. There are some very appropriate examples relating to the grounding of amplifiers and filters.

The chapter on transmission line transitions was particularly interesting, I've not seen as wide a treatment of this topic in one place before. The chapter on antennas seemed out of place at first but was quite good.

The book won't necessarily answer all of your questions but it may help to provide you with the background and inspiration you need to figure it out for yourself.

In the past 8 years that I've been working as an electrical engineer I've read dozens of books on microwave/antenna theory & design. I can confidently say that Eric Holzman's book is unique in its kind. Most young engineers, including myself, cannot even realize that their systems might suffer from RF grounding problems, until something goes very wrong. This book is a much-needed "rude awakening" into real-life microwave design problems, and deserves to find its own vital space in microwave literature.

The book essentially begins with Chapter 2, where the author attempts a nice parallelism between electrostatics and electromagnetics as a way to define the notion of "RF ground".

The core of the book comprises Chapters 3 and 4. The practical information given on proper grounding of TL's and how to make the transition between TL's is indispensable. Some nice references can be found there, too.

Chapters 5 and 6 are much more focused. Ch. 5 will benefit the amplifier designer, while Ch. 6 tries to convince the antenna designer that sometimes the ground plane is more important than the radiating element itself. Both chapters could have been much larger in extent, with many more practical examples. Unfortunately, the author and publisher decided to keep them at about 40 pages each. Nonetheless, their worth is inversely proportional to their extent.

To sum it all up, the book is worth every penny. It's a definite must for engineers who have delved into RF/MW theory but not so much into hardware and its intricacies.