eBook available: RF Osccilator Circuit Analysis and Design with Breadboard Experiments

I bought the above-named book by one John Plastonek back in 1999 and found it quite useful. I've made a quick scan of the book and stuck it up here:

(this strikes me as better than posting it to ABSE given how numerous ISPs no longer carry the 'alt' hierarchy). It's a very good book, and you'll see some of my own chicken scratchings included that correct a few minor errors as well as revealing my own gross ignorance of analog electronics :-). Plastonek prefers to view oscillators from the "negative resistance" point of view, although he does throw in a section on viewing them as feedback systems with an overall gain of

1 and no phase shift. He also spends some pages discussing "how to identify an oscillator" which I believe is meant to make it a little more intuitively obvious where some of the topologies come from, although I think Wes Hayward in "Introduction to Radio Frequency Design" does a better job here (...while not getting in as deep mathematically as Plastonek does).

I think that anyone can look at a few pages of this under "fair use" laws, although looking at the entire thing is probably a copyright violation unless you happen to own the printed copy. I've made a modest effort for a number of years now to contact the author (you can find old Usenet posts of mine about this 5+ years old now) but have been unsuccessful... the phone number now goes to someone who's never heard of him, and the e-mail address bounces. I really hope the guy is still around and simply chose not to make himself "obviously" identifiable via the Internet, although I have a suspicion he might have died... I kinda got the impression he wrote the book as a retiree, but who knows? (I also got the impression that he wasn't a native English speaker, but I can't tell what his native tongue might have been.)

---Joel