Practical RF System Design [Hardcover]

William F. Egan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471200239 | ISBN-13: 978-0471200239 | Publication Date: April 17, 2003 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

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® and Excel, spreadsheets are available for download from an FTP Web site to help readers apply the methods outlined in this important resource.

About the Author

WILLIAM F. EGAN is an instructor at Santa Clara University, California, and formerly a Principle Engineer at TRW ESD and a Senior Technologist at GTE Government Systems. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University and is the author of two previous books related to RF technology.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press; 1 edition (April 17, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471200239
• ISBN-13: 978-0471200239
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #892,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A mighty meaty little book with real life utility for anyone in RF, March 7, 2009

By 

Brett Williams (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Practical RF System Design (Hardcover)

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 2007 2nd ed of Phase Lock Basics, so there's hope), perhaps adding a chapter on new developments in microwave photonics and the receivers they allow. If you're career or HAM radio hobby depends on understanding the guts and gotchas of RF systems, don't spend one more sleepless night wondering why your receiver doesn't work. Get this book instead - sleep well.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A complete perspective to the system design, June 28, 2005

By 

Ismail H. Batum (Niceville, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Practical RF System Design (Hardcover)

An excellent source for the design of RF system level. As far as I've seen, Mr Egan collects and refines all usefull data from several important sources, makes some of them more usefull by some practical adaptations and combines them his experience about the subject. The spreadsheets provided at the Wiley's ftp site are very usefull to understand problems. It also provides necessary hints to reader for adapting them into specific problems. It is impossible to forget something about the system level design of RF after reading this book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Reference for Experienced RF Engineers, May 14, 2011

By 

Michael Coren - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Practical RF System Design (Hardcover)

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 the circuit designer can control. Instead, it treats noise figure as a value you read from a component's datasheet and have to deal with and minimize as best as you can. Similarly, the book doesn't go into circuit-level detail of how to build a receiver or an RF oscillator, but instead addresses the concerns that an RF engineer would have when employing off-the-shelf RF amplifiers, oscillators, and mixers as components in a signal chain, and how to get the best performance out of them.

A good portion of the text is dedicated to describing the accompanying Excel spreadsheets that are available from the publisher's FTP site. These are helpful in showing how the "theoretical" results can be applied to produce "real" numerical information that the designer can use in order to perform what-if analysis and signal chain optimization. Along with the Excel files, there were two or three MatLab files. I was able to run these without any problem using FreeMat, although I didn't try them with Octave.

Not being an RF designer myself, I can't say first-hand how this book would appeal to an experienced RF engineer. For my purpose, and with my background in high-speed digital and baseband analog design, I was able to follow most of the developments in this book without having to look elsewhere for background information (the notable exception being smith charts, which I hadn't used since college). In the end, I felt this book was very helpful to the process of gaining the understanding I needed to work with RF designers. That said, no book will substitute for years of RF circuit and system design experience and the "intuition" that comes with it.