Books for RF beginners

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

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Michael
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Disclaimer: While my first two money-earning jobs were in radio, I can't honestly claim to be an RF circuit designer.

Anti-disclaimer: Having said that, I've seen some real crap passed off as "RF Circuit Design", so maybe I'm restricting myself too much -- I can at least make things work!

The ARRL handbook does take the approach that it is speaking to technicians and hobbyists rather than engineers, so it sometimes presents the smoke and mirrors without showing you that it really isn't magic. It also leans toward circuits that are more high performance than a wireless gizmo that has to cost $0.10 in volume would be. None the less, if you want a truckload of circuits that work, the ARRL handbook has them.

"Introduction to Radio Frequency Design" by Hayward is a serious college-level text that gives a pretty good rundown on RF circuit design. It goes all the way down to transistor-level design, but it spends a good long time on the network theory that you'll need to use to intelligently paste blocks together. It's also published by the ARRL, so if you're going to look askance at it for that I can't stop you. I like it because it is organized for self-study; it's certainly not a book that'll only be useful in a classroom.

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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
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Tim Wescott

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:

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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 up at

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's a 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

Reply to
Joel Koltner

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Bowicks book has a few errors.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

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

Leon

Reply to
Leon

Hi Leon,

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?

Reply to
Joel Koltner

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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

Reply to
Leon

Between the ARRL Handbook and Hayward, you've got a hell of a head start. Start off with these two and come back and we'll tell you more.

Oh, and grab a couple of the old Motorola app notes by Granberg, Hejhall, and if you can find any old reference notes from Luettgenau of TRW that is also good.

Jim

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RST Engineering (jw)

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