Secrets of Rf Circuit Design

Rating:
Summary: A waste of paper
Review: "Secrets of RF Circuit Design" contains no secrets and precious little design. Commencing with some RF basics, but not a lot, the book progresses through a hotchpotch of largely redundant information referencing to obsolete devices, interspersed with occasional tiresome moralising anecdotes. Such is the unevenness that one is informed along the way that pi is a letter in the Greek alphabet but the introduction of complex numbers receives no explanation. RF essentials such as transistor cascode, Miller effect, common base etc. are barely mentioned. Likewise recent (or even past) developments in RF communication, Lecher bars, stripline, or in fact anything of consequence receive at most cursory comment. But one is guided in the repair of IF coils. How useful. How appropriate. Pity that essential note upon the solubility of thin copper wires in solder was omitted. Duh.

Many basic circuits are mentioned, though detail is simply glossed over. Almost nothing is explained to a level which is useful. The descriptions of IMPATT, TRAPITT and BARITT and other obscure devices serve only to confuse potential designers as to what they might expect to find in industry, or even what they might find in catalogues. Warning of the danger of carbon tet might be relevant, were it actually available. And so it goes, irrelevancies and misdirection.

Then there are the mistakes, factual, diagrammatic, typo and dubious opinion. Laced with so many errors the text cannot ever be taken as authoritative. I certainly didn't know that "The nautical mile is 1/360 of the Earth's circumference at the equator, more or less." This is the third edition and it is simply gross ineptitude which lets rubbish like this slip through.

With its annoying "Radio Shack" demeanour, the obtrusive, extraneous in-text references and addresses serve only to distend the already bloated text. Writing is painfully wordy, imprecise and begs severe red pen editing. Large heading font, wide margins and huge simplistic diagrams also serve to fill over five hundred pages which if decently constructed would make a book a third of the size.

...I feel cheated. It was a waste of money. Almost uniquely amongst my purchases, this book is destined for the bucket. Unmitigated dross.

Rating:
Summary: Secrets I don't know about RF Circuit design
Review: A terrible book. An ok book on Radio theory, with plenty of schematics, but absolutely nothing to do with design. A better title for this book would be: Secrets I Don't Know About RF Circuit Design. After reading this book you will not be able to design a single RF circuit. I recommend an engineering book: RF Circuit Design.

Rating:
Summary: a bad cookbook
Review: This book provides very little design info and unnecessarily oversimplified theory of operation. It is a book for whom want to design by trial and error or just experiment for fun.