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I want to plug these two books, because I value them at the same level as Jackson’s Electrodynamics or Corson and Lorrain’s Electromagnetic Fields and Waves

• Paul Nahin’s Science of Radio
• Dave Rutledge’s The Electronics of Radio

When I think about antennas, I often end up thinking about Maxwell’s Equations and radiating dipoles. I can’t help it, and rightly so, and which is where Jackson’s text comes in. But after Jackson, which is dense and of biblical authority, you want to read something a bit more practical and accessible.

The two books above are great complements in the quest to understand RF phenomena. Nahin treats the history and basic physics of radio, while Rutledge treats a real working analog radio, the NorCal40a. You can buy the NorCal40a in kit form, assemble it, operate it, and read about every aspect of its theory of operation in Dave’s book. Wow. So cool.

RF science is genuinely hard, because you’re dealing with time varying propagating fields in real world physical systems. Here, real world is shorthand for extremely complicated and begging for first and second order approximations. These two books get us started in those approximations and the radio physics they describe.

[tags]rf, radio frequency, radio, electrodynamics, ham radio[/tags]