Electromagnetics and Transmission Lines
Robert Alan Strangeway, Steven Sean Holland and James Elwood Richie
The strengths of this book are in its clarity of the examples, exercises and the provided solutions, as well as the content in transmission lines, antennas, links and signal integrity (Chapters 6 through 9). The book would have benefited from focusing and diving deeper into these four chapters. For example, separating signal integrity and power integrity and then EMI and EMC with the inclusion of material covering FCC Part 15, Part 18 and SAR as opposed to some of the other material which is covered at a surface level. The section on the dos and don’ts of decibels stood out as practical content that all engineers could benefit from understanding. For completion, the inclusion of microstrips and striplines, two of the most commonly used transmission lines in PCB design, is necessary. Furthermore, expanding this style of description in additional sections, like when to use a spectrum analyzer versus a vector network analyzer, or how to characterize video bandwidth versus resolution bandwidth in a spectrum analyzer would have also been helpful. The link budget section deserves a whole chapter with the possible inclusion and expansion on topics like satellite communications, spread spectrum techniques, thermal noise, Eb/No, Es/No, signal-to-noise ratio, signal to interference and noise ratio and other figures of merit that impact communications systems. With these modifications, future iterations of this book will be better suited to target a more cohesive audience of hobbyists and engineers.
Review by:
Whitney Lohmeyer
To order this book, contact:
Wiley