Customer Reviews

Practical Rf Design Manual

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have many kilograms of books that promise the "secrets" of good RF design. Where one author doesn't feel able to use calculus, another falls over backwards to explain it in all its historical glory. Amongst all the maths there are thousands of circuits illustrating, over and over again, the 'form' of a Colpitt's oscillator and variations on a Chebychev filter...yadayadayada...important stuff, I guess, but...<YAWN>...excuse me!

My major interest in radio is high-quality receiver design, but I haven't found much of that in all the paper I've looked at.

Doug DeMaw's book is a refreshing change. He shows many circuits with COMPONENT VALUES. He states that the building blocks in his book are not optimised for any particular application, but he gives the reassurance that they WILL WORK. The discussion of the circuits he provides tells you enough to make choices about important issues such as: component values; active versus passive elements; which designs best suit which bands and the logic behind such decisions.

I'm not saying this book is the best starting-point for a raw beginner, but if you are a serious radio experimenter and you enjoy home-brewing your Ham or SWL equipment, you're probably going to need the sound, practical advice contained in this book.

The alternative is to get one of those other 'theoretical' books, try to stay awake, and then spend months doing maths before getting to build anything...maybe that's a better way, but it's not for me. I appreciate the more hands-on approach for designing and building a project. When I REALLY need to tweak a system, I'll go back to those other texts and solve a few of the equations.

With [W1FB] Doug DeMaw helping, there shouldn't be too many heartaches in getting home-brewed transmitters, receivers and linear amps up and running...Best of luck!

DeMaw's Practical RF Design Manual is one of those rare books that everyone from the advanced RF tech and Ham, to the RF engineer, should have available at all times. Great design explanations on RF amplifiers, mixers, detectors, oscillators, etc. Only wish it had a few more design formulas; but it's still an instant wireless classic!

Cotter W. Sayre

Author of "The Complete RF Technician's Handbook"

This book is laden with typos, hilariously, including a doozy in the very first sentence of the Preface! Virtually every subsequent page continues the typo tradition, in both text and schematics.

The topic coverage is haphazard and incomplete. What kind of general educational RF book would start out, first chapter, with a discussion of tube vs. transistor in transmitters?

This seems more a book for the ham tinkerer than the serious commercial designer. I'm a very experienced design engineer whose main knowledge gap is RF. Although I could follow this book, I don't feel it has given me any real insight into RF design. I will certainly keep it as a secondary reference from which the occasional useful tidbit might be gleaned, but that's about all I can say.