Customer Reviews

22 Radio and Receiver Projects for the Evil Genius

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My wife knew I was interested in getting into radio electronics as a hobby and bought this for me as a Christmas gift. While the initial chapters provide some interesting background material, the chapters describing the projects have some serious issues. For example, I started with Chapter 8 IC Shortwave Radio Receiver, because I wanted to build a shortwave radio from scratch. While the chapter included a schematic (courtesy of Ramsay electronics), there was no pictorial layout, or checklist of construction order which can be frustraing to a beginner in electronics. The real shock came when I figured out that I could order the project described in this chapter as a kit from Ramsay electronics. At no point in this chapter is it stated that this project could be ordered as a kit, which would save much time and frustration. I ended up ordering the kit from Ramsay, and when I read the kit manual, I noticed that the manual text was identical to some of the text in this chapter!!!

In summary:
- some of the backgound information is interesting and useful
- the lack of pictorial diagrams and checklists will make project building for the beginner difficult
- the material for at least one of the chapters in this book has come from another source, which does not see to be properly acknowledged. Maybe the author, publisher and Ramsay electronics have an agreement, but if so why is it not stated that the project could be ordered in kit form?

There are some interesting aspects of classical (antique) radio technology
found. I did not know, that whistlers were first time detected by Austrian scientists in 1886. The explanations from crystal detectors to wheather satellite receivers are well made and helpfull for beginners, but

the book can NOT be used directly for undergraduate/freshman-courses because:
part lists sometimes incomplete, sometimes wrong
some parts obsolete since 2004 - the book is printed in 2008

you can save a lot of space if you print the ceramic, mylar and mica capacitor code only once (I found it more than 10 times)

it would be nice to read the metric values of lengths, wire diameters, ...

the circuit diagrams are much more readable if you use standard symbols or symbols as used in data sheets or application reports. Don't use rectangles with pin numbers.

Finally, it would be helpfull for foreign people (non US people) to get information about time code receivers outside the USA (there is one in Germany - DCF77 or in Great Britain)

Fine book for the basics of radio receivers

I agree with some other reviewers that stated that there was some useful background information in the beginning of the book, but any of the actual projects utilizing solid-state components are next to useless. First of all, it appears to me that the author(s) simply took several Ramsey kits and reprinted the directions in whole or part, without the benefit of PCBs. In many, many, places, sentences and paragraphs are duplicated in the text, and each project includes several pages of redundant information on how to read parts values and how to solder and so forth, an artifact --I suspect-- of having ripped off the instruction booklets of these kits. One might suppose it would still be possible to build these projects from the book's instructions, but unfortunately all of the solid-state projects require ICs that are obsolete by several years, and generally unavailable.

If you see this book in your local library, by all means check it out and give it a look, but don't pay for this.

I had high hopes for this book, as this is a hobby I'm just getting into, but was dismayed after buying it to discover that most of the projects reference PC boards, but no PC board layouts or sources for the boards are given. Then I realized, after doing some research, that most of the projects in this book are actually taken from KITS that are available from Elenco, Ramsey Electronics, and Vectronics! Chapters 6, 8, 11, and 13 are Ramsey kits; chapter 9 is a Vectronics kit (an older version of one they now offer, it appears); chapter 12 is an Elenco kit. Other projects are thinly re-written versions of material from the web; e.g., Chapter 10 is a design by VE7BPO (not VE7BFO, as stated [barely]) in the credit for the schematic. I haven't found the sources for all of the projects, but it appears that very few, if any, are actually original to the book. Worse, *none* of them are properly credited.

Save yourself the money and just search out the projects at the kit makers' websites or on the web. This is more than a very disappointing book -- it is a ripoff.

I will say that this book does have a nice variety of radio projects, ranging from very basic crystal sets to more sophisticated short-wave and FM radios. However, this has got to be one of the most poorly-edited technical books I have ever read. It just cannot make up its mind as to what reader technical level it is aiming at. Pretty much EVERY SINGLE PROJECT chapter contains several paragraphs of instruction on how to solder, learning what parts look like, organizing your work space, and similar hand-holding. There's a how-to-read-resistor-color-codes instruction page in EVERY CHAPTER! Material like that belongs at the beginning of the book, ONCE. Furthermore, such "This is what a resistor looks like" instructions seem completely out-of-place for the more sophisticated projects - as if someone who didn't know what a resistor was would attempt them! Also, the technical depth of explanations for each circuit was very inconsistent, and quite superficial for the more complicated projects. Lastly, the schematics would be MUCH more useful if the components had basic resistance and capacitance values, and device type numbers, rather than just reference designators (R1, C2, U4, etc.).

I didn't buy this book; I borrowed it from the library.

There are no radio transmitter projects - thus, in my view, it is only half the book it should be.