jhs%Mitre-Bedford@d3unix.UUCP (04/10/85)
The American Radio Relay League, 225 Main St., Newington CT 06111 is one of the better sources of publications helpful to beginners in Amateur Radio. Also, if you can find a Heathkit store or an amateur radio supply house, they usually have a lot of things you can browse through. In particular, the League and several other publishers offer "license manuals" or "study guides" for the ham license examinations. These are worth studying to get the hang of the kind of questions you will be asked. Also, I think the League can now sell you a list of exam questions from which your own actual FCC exam will be selected. As for general reading to get a background in radio and electronic theory to help you both pass the exam and design your own equipment, I would suggest the League's very popular Radio Amateur's Handbook and Antenna Handbook. Two other less obvious sources: Look up the name Marcus in your local library's card catalog, author index. Marcus wrote several excellent books on radio in the 60s or so which are still among the clearest sources for beginners. His books may be "tube" oriented, but a lot of the theory is exactly (almost) the same. The second reference is the ancient but honorable RCA Tube Manual of the '60s or so. The beginning of it is an EXCELLENT "Schaum's Outline" of radio circuit technology which, though "tube-oriented", is still very true and useful as the basis for transistor circuit design. Here, you will learn about amplifiers, oscillators, discriminators and envelope detectors, rectifier circuits like half wave, full wave, bridge, etc. RCA may continue the tradition and offer some very helpful transistor and IC oriented educational material today, but I am not familiar with their current stuff so can't give a specific reference. Contact your friendly sales rep, make sure he knows who you work for, and drop some hints about how you would like to get copies of such literature! Note that Motorola, Signetics, National Semiconductor, and many others, all have such literature and also lots of "Application Notes" which you can get free and which are full of general technical information and also practical circuit design information. Another place to find lots of information is the trade magazines like EDN, Elctronic Design, Computer Design, etc., most of which are free for the effort of filling out a subscription order card. Good luck! 73, John H. Sangster, W3IKG jhs at mitre-bedford