I am interested in learning electrical engineering, but I am unable to attend a local college for various reasons (first being distance) and I am a bit dubious of an online college for such a involved field.
I have had some previous college many years ago including calculus through diff equ., physics, optics, english, and even one course in electromagetics, but everything is very rusty and I have some doubts it will be as easy as getting back on a bike.
I already have a basic understanding of electronics. I understand Kirchoff's laws, know how to bias a transistor amplifier, design simple op-amp circuits, and a decent understanding of digital electronics including several microcontrollers. What I don't have is a firm grasp of electromagnetics and RF. I want an engineer's understanding of this, not just a cookbook knowledge of a few circuits.
I purchased the third edition of John D. Kraus' Electromagnetics and I plan to work through the entire book but I am unsure if I will be able to obtain a complete understanding without an extensive review of calculus and possibly other resources I do not know about.
If you were to try and self teach electrical engineering, where would you start?
Don't worry about that, you're already an order of magnitude ahead of
90% of today's students. The bigger problems are, can you get financing (including scholarships, which shouldn't be too hard if you're good at relearning those mathy subjects), secure all possible transfer credits (probably about half the curriculum is going to be stuff you've already done, but it may not all fit into their framework), and be able to live on campus if the travel is too far. And work nearby if possible.
What kind of engineering are you looking for? If you need that piece of paper, you have to pay for it. If you're working somewhere that doesn't require certification, but does require an engineer, a cheaper course is acceptable. If they don't require a piece of paper at all, then don't bother, just go to work. You'll learn more in two years on the job than you will at any university, and it's all applied experience. Emphasize your talents on your resume, it should be no problem.
I'd suggest picking up a copy of Hayward's "Introduction to Radio Frequency Design" and Bowick's "RF Circuit Design" -- they're well-written and have many examples.
Those books -- and pretty much all RF design-oriented textbooks -- largely assume you already know that you want to build an LNA or matching network or oscillator or whatever; it's a "bottom up" approach. If you're interested in more of a "top down" approach -- "let's build a radio! ... oh, wait, I guess that means we need a mixer and an amplifier, and I guess THAT means we need some diode rings and some transistors, and..." -- you might look at something like "Build Your Own Intelligent Amateur Radio Transceiver" by Henderson, as it still contains a fair amount of circuit theory.
Or you could just read the last chapter of Hayward's book first ("The Receiver: An RF System") and then go back to chapter 1. :-)
This is a very good book; it's a shame that more schools don't use it. (Especially since it tends to have a lot more "real world" problems than, e.g., Cheng without being quite so hard-core with the math. I sometimes think that texts like Cheng's and Jackson's [egads!] are favored to keep EM courses the "weeder" classes that they've often known to be...)
I second the opinion of the guy who suggested looking through the free MIT courses on-line. It can be difficult on your own to figure out which parts of a book matter the most and which are secondary, whereas this is generally obvious if you start looking at course syllabi. This is particularly important in more advanced courses, where the books become closer to hybrid instructional/reference texts -- no microwave course anywhere has their students read every single page of Pozar, for instance.
One final note: Check out the offerings from companies like Mini-Circuits. They'll sell you VCOs, mixers, amplifiers, etc. for very little money, and bolting a few of those items together makes it almost trivially easy to build radios. While you're working on, e.g., a quadrature detector circuit (or perhaps some fancy DSP demodulation algorithm, if you want to go that way), you can use their parts to insure you're at least getting a decent signal without having to design every last little piece yourself. (This is very similar to how software is designed these days -- clearly any good programmer could go out and write a network stack or a GUI or somesuch, but it's ridiculous to write all this stuff from scratch when such good libraries for it already exist. Concentrate on the parts that interest you the most...)
---Joel
P.S. -- Good web site: Microwaves101.Com. Much of what those multi-GHz guys worry about applies at much lower frequencies as well... plus you can do neat things like building your isolators or circulators out of op-amps rather than anisotropic ferrites.
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