Experimental Methods in RF Design

What Hacker News says

1. ohgrApr 2025
   No. This book won’t teach you that because based on the author’s previous work he doesn’t either. He knows how to sell books.

   If you really want to know how transistors work and how to use them properly it’s going to be difficult as they sit on a fairly large pile of algebra and theory. If you don’t know this you might be able to get simple circuits working by cutting and pasting bits but you won’t be able to get past that ever.

   The best references on this are actually The Art of Electronics. Not necessarily the main book but the associated student manual. Also the book Experimental Methods in RF Design by Wes Hayward actually has the most useful functional description and modelling approach of transistors.

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2. wrldosJan 2023
   My EE lecturer described Forrest Mims as the single largest source of brain damage in the EE community. Unlearning the abstractions in those books was a common source of problems apparently.

   Ergo I'm glad I steered around them. My favourite author on such matters is Wes Hayward, particularly Experimental Methods in RF Design which taught me more about electronics than any other book out there.

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3. gw99Sep 2022
   As always these things tell us how transistors work, which is fine and all that, but that's not enough to tell anyone how to use one which is almost universally done incorrectly even in some high profile textbooks. They are a little more complicated than this video can muster. In fact I'd argue that it's probably worth skipping this and delving into the mathematics properly.

   Wes Hayward W7ZOI explains this side of things rather well in his book Experimental Methods in RF design. Some of the content is duplicated here discussing bipolar transistor feedback amplifier designs: http://w7zoi.net/transistor_models_and_the_fba.pdf

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