Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Classical Electromagnetic Radiation

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This text is strikes a nice balance between being detailed and still remaining reasonably easy to follow. I like this text a lot because it covers less common topics and derives things. For example, it talks about Gaussian pulses exciting an antenna as well as the standard time-harmonic sinusiodal case. I am not really an antenna guy, but I have to say I found it interesting/amusing that I never even thought about anything other than a sine wave exciting an antenna until I saw this book, because that was all I had seen previously in books. I originally looked at this book while trying to find a discussion for scattering from a circular aperture that is small compared to the wavelength (think of a shielded enclosure with small holes like in your microwave oven). Smith has a complete derivation and gives the the correct transmission coefficient. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics (a fine book) tackles this, but uses simplified assumptions for the field in the mouth of the aperture, and does not quite get the correct answer because of the questionable assumptions, as Jackson himself points out. I have found only one electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) book (by Christopoulos) that even bothers to list a formula (much less derive it) for what I think is an important topic (shielding by a metal screen with holes) in EMC. This is one of those books that you will still be glad to have 20 years from now because there is almost nothing in it that will become outdated in 20 years - it explains a great many important fundamental topics very well.

This is a good engineering reference, with a slight physics twist. Much of the material is engineering related, but there are some topics (such as Cherenkov radiation - more suitable as a physics discussion) that is well covered. Overall, a good reference text.