Designing and Building Transmitters and Receivers in a Single Semester
This page was created to document a senior design course taught by the author for 20 years at Kansas State University. It is related to the “Radio Design 101” series of videos on YouTube, but goes into more depth (at the expense of being less polished in presentation )
Lectures and Class Handouts
Each link below leads to lecture notes (hand written and a bit rough) plus course handouts (typed and much nicer) on the associated topic.
- Syllabus, Parts List, and Typical Assignments
- Prototyping Boards
- Course Introduction
- Electronic Amplifier Design
- Transistors at RF
- Resonant Circuits
- Component Parasitics
- Impedance Matching and Power Gain
- Transmission Lines and Smith Charts
- Two Port Linear Circuit Modeling and S-Parameters
- RF Test Equipment
- Oscillators, Varactors, and VCOs plus Crystals and TCXOs
- Transmitters, Antennas, FCC Rules, and Midterm Exam
- Mixers and Frequency Downconversion
- Toroids, Transformers, and Cores
- Filters
- IF Amp, Demod, and Audio Amp
- Final Receiver Assembly
PLEASE NOTE: Over the years, students have found this course to be challenging and time-consuming, but worth the effort. I hope these lecture notes and course handouts are useful to individuals and universities who want to learn or teach radio frequency (RF) / wireless hardware design topics in the future.
