Quan - Build your own transistor radios: a hobbyists guide to high-performance and low-powered radio circuits

Ronald Quan, a resident of Cupertino, California, has a BSEE degree from the University of California at Berkeley and is a member of SMPTE, IEEE, and AES. He has worked as a broadcast engineer for FM and AM radio stations, and for over 30 years he has worked for video and audio equipment companies (Ampex, Sony Corporation, Monster Cable, and Macrovision). Mr. Quan designed wide-band FM detectors for an HDTV tape recorder at Sony, and a twice color subcarrier frequency (7.16 MHz) differential phase measurement system for Macrovision, where he was a principal engineer. Also, at Hewlett Packard he developed a family of low-powered bar code readers that drained a fraction of the power consumed by conventional light pen readers.

Mr. Quan holds at least 70 U.S. patents in the areas of analog video processing, low-noise amplifier design, low-distortion voltage-controlled amplifiers, wide-band crystal voltage-controlled oscillators, video monitors, audio and video IQ modulation, in-band carrier audio single-sideband modulation and demodulation, audio and video scrambling, bar code reader products, and audio test equipment. In 2005 he was a guest speaker at the Stanford University Electrical Engineering Departments graduate seminar, talking on lower noise and distortion voltage-controlled amplifier topologies. In November 2010 he presented a paper on amplifier distortion to the Audio Engineering Societys conference in San Franciscos Moscone Center.

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Ever since the invention of amplitude-modulated (AM) radio during the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a unique interest on the part of hobbyists to build various types of receivers from the crystal radios of that era in the 1900s to the software-defined radios (SDRs) in the twenty-first century. In between the crystal receivers and SDRs are the tuned radio-frequency, regenerative, reflex, and conventional superheterodyne receivers. This book will cover these types of radios from will illustrate two types of front-end circuits for SDRs using analog and sampling methods to generate I and Q signals.

This book actually has two personalities. The first 12 chapters are organized as a do-it-yourself (DIY) book. Starting from , a coil-less superheterodyne radio design is presented.

Throughout based on their course work.

The last half of the book from are presented in a step-by-step manner as if the equations or formulas are being written on a white board or chalk board during a lecture. Therefore, this book tries its best not to skip steps in the explanations.

Descriptions on how RF mixers and oscillators work, including large-signal behavior analysis, are generally taught in graduate engineering classes. However, even though modified Bessel functions are mentioned, the explanation of the modified Bessel functions is shown in an intuitive manner via tables and graphs.

For the engineer who has seen transistor amplifier analysis, this book will cover both small- and large-signal behavior, which also includes harmonic and intermodulation distortion.

shows how a circuit can be assembled on an index card without soldering any of the parts.