Customer Reviews

Software Radio: A Modern Approach to Radio Engineering

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

 

 

This book is a one-stop source for everything you need to know about Software Radio. So, this is an excellent text-book for a 1-semester course on software radio. Some of the concepts such as analog-to-digital conversion are discussed in detail, although the relevance of a 70 page chapter on smart antennas in a Software Radio book still eludes me. A good introduction to RF implementation issues is provided. There isn't too much Math in this book, which is both good and bad. My only complaint is that there are lot of errors, both conceptual and typographical, in this book and many of these errors are not addressed in the webpage maintained by the author. Otherwise, it is a very good book.

My motivation for purchasing this text was for a graduate level course on Software Defined Review in Electrical Engineering. The text was somewhat useful with relatively clear illustrations, formulas, and text. The text was somewhat useful with clear illustrations and formulas but lacked the clarity desired to grasp a full understanding of the material from simply reading the book. As such, the text was primarily used as a reference source when lecture material failed to provided enough depth or coverage of a particular subject area. In summary, I would recommend purchasing this book if required but I would look for another text if you are simply trying to get a better understanding of the subject.

I give this book a 5, despite the errors, because of how well it covered such a broad topic. The reviewer above mentioned the chapter on RF implementation issues, which was very good. The chapter on smart antennas is pretty good also. I think that it is included because the "software" part of a software defined radio is where beam-steering and space-diversity algorithms are implmented. It's not totally out of place and provides for some breadth. All of these VT profs (Reed, Durgin, Rappaport) tend to put out books that facilitate understanding and then, when you are ready for the underlying mathematics, they'll cite you the places to go for that. IMHO, that's a good approach- otherwise, they might as well not write books and just slap together a bunch of papers, bind 'em and call that a rigorous text.

I usually expect any book coming out of a university to be highly theoretical and math-centric, but this book is neither. It's a clear exposition of software radio concepts and issues, with a great deal of attention paid to signal generation and processing. Unlike another reviewer, I was happy to see 70 pages devoted to smart antennas, since any multi-protocol transceiver operating in the GHz range is going to need them. The exposition is clear, well developed and well written. More editing would have helped, but overall highly recommended.