Ronald Quan - Electronics from the Ground Up: Learn by Hacking, Designing, and Inventing

Ronald Quan has a BSEE degree from the University of California at Berkeley and is a member of SMPTE, IEEE, and the AES. He has worked as a broadcast engineer for FM and AM radio stations, and he also holds an Extra Class amateur radio license.

He is the author of Build Your Own Transistor Radios (McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics, 2012), a book that covers theory and practice pertaining to radios, circuits, and signals and also includes a multitude of newly designed radio circuits.

For over 30 years he has worked for companies related to video and audio equipment (Ampex, Sony, Macrovision, Monster Cable, and Portal Player). At Ampex, he designed CRT (cathode ray tube) TV monitors and low-noise preamplifiers for audio and video circuits. Other designs included wide-band FM detectors for an HDTV tape recorder at Sony Corporation, and a twice color subcarrier frequency (7.16 MHz) differential phase measurement system at Macrovision, where he was a Principal Engineer. Also at Macrovision he designed several phase lock loop circuits to provide a regenerated clock signal from the raw EFM (eight-fourteen modulation) data stream from a CD player.

At Hewlett Packard, working in the field of opto-electronics, he developed a family of low-powered bar code readers, which used a fraction of the power consumed by conventional light pen readers.

Currently, he is the holder of at least 400 worldwide patents (which includes over 80 United States patents) in the areas of analog video processing, video signal noise reduction, 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 Stanford University Electrical Engineering Departments graduate seminar, talking on lower noise and distortion voltage-controlled amplifier topologies. He has served as a mentor in three different electrical engineering lab courses at Stanford University. And in November 2010 and October 2012 he presented papers in audio amplifier distortion to the Audio Engineering Societys Conference in San Franciscos Moscone Center.

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Learning electronics from the ground up requires a foundation of knowledge of electronic components more than resistors, capacitors, diodes, and transistors. This book also covers different types of batteries and construction techniques.

This book is roughly divided into three sectionsbeginner, intermediate, and advanced levels for the hobbyist. There are projects for the hobbyist in all these sections to gain some practical experience and to reinforce some basic principles in electronics.

As the title says, Electronics From the Ground Up, this book is intended not only to introduce the hobbyist to electronics but also to lift the hobbyist to the next level in terms of learning and building more complicated circuits. This book is geared toward the hobbyist. However, there are some advanced topics discussed as well, such as a look into harmonic distortion analysis, which is written in terms of high school mathematics.