Books for RF beginners

[Michael]

Hey there - it looks like I'm going to be doing a bit of RF work in
the next couple of months. This will mostly involve setting up an RF
link between a couple RF transceivers (probably zigbee) - doing
circuit design for said transcievers, antenna selection, board layout,
etc. I have a bachelors in electrical engineering, but my focus was on
small signal analog, not RF. RF is pure black magic to me.

With that said - can anybody suggest a good book for me to start with?
I've heard some people say the ARRL handbook is a good place to start,
while others say that that is about the last place one should start.
Somebody here recommended "Complete Wireless Design", which seems like
it might be reasonable.

Opinions?

Thanks!

-Michael

 

[Leon]

The ARRL handbook is good for getting a "big picture" overview of what's going
on, but if you're looking for hard mathematical derivations (rather than just
results), you usually won't find it there... although many of the chapters
have extensive reference lists.

For what you're doing, you might check out the ARRL's microwave offerings
here:http://www.arrl.org/catalog/index.php3?category=VHF/UHF/Microwave


For what you're doing, it might be.  Complete Wireless Design is rather
cook-booky, but it does have enough technical details that based on your
background you'll probably end up with a solid grasp on what's going on and
covers a lot of ground.

Since you say you'll be doing "circuit design" -- do you just mean dropping
down someone's Zigbee IC down on a board and connecting up the antenna, etc.?
Or are you planning to build some matching networks, RF power amplifiers (or
LNAs), etc.?  In the later case, some of the good classic RF circuit design
texts include...

"Introduction to Radio Frequency Design," by Wes Hayward -- Mainly aimed at
the world of HF and low VHF, but of course the principles are the same upat
2.4GHz... you just need to be a lot more careful of parasitics.  Quite
accessible, very well written.
"RF Circuit Design (2nd ed.)," Christopher Bowick -- Covers a lot of the same
material as Hayward's book, but includes a lot more worked-out examples.

RF circuit texts that specifically address design at 2.4GHz are a bit harder
to come by, especially in forms that are suitable to self study.  A couple I
like include...

"Planar Microwave Engineering," Thomas Lee -- He's going to suggest that you
build everything on Rogers material, but he really does know his stuff.
Although it covers a lot of ground, he has 858 pages to do it in, and it's
noticeably more detailed than his "Design of CMOS Radio Frequency Integrated
Circuits" which seemed to spend a paragraph reminding you of Maxwell's
equations and would then have a homework problem asking you to come up with
analytical expressions for the fields surrounding an irregular tetrahedron
made of lossy material.  Lee's books are quite readable, though -- he'sa bit
of a character, and will introduce you to plenty of RF history along with
teaching you design.
"Introduction to Microwave Circuits," Rober Weber -- Similar material as the
above (though not as comprehensive), but includes more emphasis on actually
building and measuring this stuff (I get the impression that Weber builds
circuits for real products whereas Lee just has his grad students build them
as part of research projects to publish papers...)

As usual, check out Amazon.Com... punch in some of these titles are see which
lists they ended up on, "customers who bought this item also bought," etc....

---Joel

Bowicks book has a few errors.

Leon

 

[Leon]

Experimental Methods in RF Design by Hayward et al is worth getting,
although it's mainly about HF.

Leon

 

[Leon]

Hi Leon,


"Bowicks book has a few errors."

Yeah, undoubtedly.    But are you talking about the first (brown cover) or
second (black/green cover) edition?  Are were they computational/numerical
errors, or were some equations themselves wrong?

The brown cover edition. Some of them are quite serious, IIRC. I did
see them documented somewhere, but I can't remember where. I think I
marked a couple in my copy, I'll see if I can find it.

Leon