Customer Reviews

Practical RF System Design

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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.

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.

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.

If you design RF systems in the real world you really need this book! I'm an RF systems engineer with 27 year of experience. And I can say that this book is worth 2 years of on-the-job experience. Egan explains the nut and bolts of how to make an RF system work. He tackles the immensely important details of noise budgets, compression points, intermods, dynamic range and a dozen other vital topics. He not only explains these issues he gives you the actual tools you need to carry out the design techniques. The spreadsheets that he uses in the book are available from the publisher website! These aren't academic subjects he's talking about they are real design techniques ready to use! This book is destined to be one of the classics, a must for every engineer's bookshelf. RF engineers do yourself a favor and get this book!

This book is not for beginners. It assumes that you have experience in RF hardware design. The book shows how to calculate the second order effects in systems using simple spread sheet methods. The spread sheets are available for download at the Wiley FTP site given in the book.