The topic of this book is the analysis and design of radio systems and their constituent subsytems and devices. Chapters 1–6 cover the basics of radio: antennas, propagation, noise, and modulation. Chapters 8–18 cover radio hardware: circuits, device technology where relevant, and the basics of digital signal processing. The intervening Chapter 7 (“Radio Link Analysis”) serves as the bridge between these two parts of the book by demonstrating how system-level characteristics lead to particular hardware characteristics, and vice versa. Appendix B serves as a summary of commonly-encountered radio systems in this context. Appendix A addresses modeling of path loss in terrestrial channels, building on the fundamentals presented in Chapter 3 (“Propagation”).

This book presumes the reader is interested primarily in communications applications, however, most of the material is relevant to other applications of radio including navigation, radar, radio astronomy, geophysical remote sensing, and radio science.

The use of the term “systems engineering” in the title of this book bears some explanation. In the parlance of communications engineers, the scope of this book is limited to considerations at the physical layer and below, with little coverage of issues at higher layers of the protocol stack. Further, some readers may judge that only Chapters 1, 7, and Appendix B (or maybe just Chapter 7) address systems engineering, in the sense of complete “end-to-end” system analysis and design. Nevertheless, the title “Radio Systems Engineering” seems appropriate because each topic – especially those in Chapters 8–18 – is presented in the context of system-level design, with extensive cross-referencing to associated topics in the first half of the book and to Chapter 7.

Intended uses of this book This book is has been written with three possible uses in mind.