2018 Albuquerque Duke City Hamfest/ARRL Rocky Mountain Division Convention

The Electronics of Radio is a book designed to teach people electronics by studying the design of the wonderful NorCal 40A QRP transceiver. It grew out of an electronics class I taught at Caltech, where the students worked through the construction of a QRP transceiver, the NorCal 40A, designed by Wayne Burdick. Today’s students start with no experience in building electrical or mechanical systems. They have not tinkered with cars or built transceivers. This makes it difficult for them to appreciate the importance of many topics and to understand how the different parts of a system fit together. For instance, to many students, impedance is just a number to plug into a calculator. They are indifferent as to whether the value is 50 Ω or 1 MΩ. Building a QRP transceiver can help students appreciate that the circuits within a system may have very different impedance levels and that they need matching circuits to go from one to the other.

Although the book has been used in college courses at the University of Colorado and at Caltech, it has  been most popular with amateur-radio operators.