Hello members !, this is my first thread since I have joined the forum.

I'm currently interested in RF wave transmission and reception. I'm basically an electronics engineer ( to be graduated) and know very well the concepts behind circuit design and analysis, and the associated mathematics too. But unfortunately, RF design was not taught in the university with much attention, all circuits we dealt with were low frequency ones. The high frequency models were merely introduced for formality. With such a situation, I would like to build circuits, starting from scratch, (with transistors, oscillators,etc) that can generate, transmit and receive radio frequency waves of order 1 MHz-100 MHz. Can the experienced members point to reference materials that I can avail of , which would promote my interests ?
The reference material can be any book , online materials or anything else, that treats the subject with intution rather than complicated math (though math and physics are welcome, as I am an engineering student.)So far, in my search on the net , I have not encountered anything useful.

Hoping your replies.

 

Get a Ham license, and talk to the world with radios and antennas that you build. That is how I started. Still doing it daily...

 

Ok, here are some hard truths.

First of all, radio engineering is really hard. You need immense amounts of knowledge and experience to even get started. Even if you want to build a simple AM receiver you need years of reading, IF you really want to know exactly what is going on. Otherwise, you can just copy a schematic from the internet and pretend that you understand how it functions just because you put it together.

The second hard truth is that, unfortunately, most of the ham radio operators fall under the later category. I am a ham radio operator myself, I took my license 5 years ago and, to my disappointment, I discovered that the ham radio community is comprised mostly of old people who don't really know what their expensive toys do. They may know tons of tricks gained by decades of devotion to this hobby (more or less, that's what it is for them) but tricks cannot replace true knowledge.

To answer your question, there is no 1 book that includes everything you need to know in order to start building your own circuits. Just to give you a glimpse of the reality, radios are using concepts from antennas, electromagnetic theory, circuits, semiconductor devices, signal processing and all these fields are distinct scientific fields where people make academic careers based on one of them. Now, imagine combining all of them.

Again, if all you want is see some circuits and build some stuff, one of the most complete books is the ARRL handbook. But, don't forget that it is a book for ham radio operators and what I said above applies, that is, you will learn how to build radios and their components (mixers, oscillators, etc), what materials to use, etc, but you will not get any explanation of how they were designed or how they really work.

 

Hello,

When you will do some effort to get a HAM licence, you will have a couple of ham radio bands depending on the country you live in.
If you want to know more about RF related stuff, have a look at this thread I created some time ago:
RF related links

Bertus