Customer Reviews

Wireless Digital Communications: Modulation and Spread Spectrum Applications

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

 

 

Half the book seems dedicated to advertising the author's patented modulation schemes. The "software" included is a circa 1980 DOS program with something akin to CGA graphics, no source code and it applies only to a minor fraction of the material covered in the text.

This book is full of major errors, poorly written, poorly referenced, misleading and confusing. Also, it is full of improper self-promotion and unfair attempts to convert the reader to the author's dubious "inventions." Instead of this book, I would recommend the books by Stuber, Rappaport, Steele, Goodman, and Jakes, among others.

Looks like the initial intent was to cover a lot of topics, but the quality of presentation is quite poor. I is a pain to read this book due to a numerous typos, mistakes in solutions (the first example, 3.2.1.b gives wrong solution, any weather radar technitial understands that the Doppler frequency must be doubled). Author seems to be a good administrator but not a good writer. Also several wrong reference citings has been found. Self boasting, however, is felt from the very beginning.

This book is terrible. Don't waste you money. Never having seen such a poorly written, self promoting text, I took it upon myself to look further into the matter.

Basically, the book is a pitch for the authors so called patented FQPSK. Upon further investigation, I discovered that an entity called "digcom" licenses fqpsk. The web site, ..., list a cartel of sorts that leads one to believe that many major companies are embracing fqpsk as a standard. I contacted a couple of the companies listed and talked to the VP's of engineering. They all had nothing good to say, and were suprised that digcom still listed them as part of the fqpsk consortium. Basically, they had given up on fqpsk and pulled out of the consortium.

An informative and highly useful book. I found this book to be readable overall and it contained cutting-edge info (when I first read the book in 1996) about wireless communications, spread spectrum, etc. There seems to be some variation in the level of lucidity, clarity, readability and the level of depth vs. breadth in explaining the material between the various chapters, indicating that perhaps the author is more knowledgeable on some topics compared to others. Regretfully I agree with some of the previous Amazon reviewers that the author places too much emphasis on the modulation schemes that go by his name, but overall the book was helpful to our design team at the time as a good source and we referred to it often in the initial modem design phases.

This extraordinary book gives in depth information on the subject. Author shows his maturity from the first page of the book. Anyone who is willing to design a digital communications system must read this book. It comes with a unique example of the advanced mode FQPSK designed by the author. This mode is selected to use in space and aviation communication.

In-depth coverage of modulation scheme, but somewhat limited. Good book for those keen on learning one of the proprietary modulation schemes out there.

The GMSK constellation diagram on Page 169 is NOT correct. Furthermore, we can not search back to the original paper listed. The reference paper does NOT have that diagram.