RF and Wireless Made Simple

Course 234

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Summary

This two-day day course provides nontechnical professionals with a firm understanding of basic RF principles and technical concepts. RF technology, wave propagation and transmission techniques will be characterized for various performance requirements. This course will also convey a conceptual understanding of RF wireless systems and how they work for the multiple wireless standards. All explanations use simple physical descriptions without complex mathematics.

Learning objectives

Upon completing the course you will be able to:

  • Understand the RF language
  • Describe RF energy and transmission techniques
  • Convert numbers to dB without a calculator
  • Describe RF performance and electrical signal principles
  • Illustrate the block diagram of a complete wireless system
  • Describe how voice and video signals are digitized, compressed, and corrected
  • Explain multiple access technology
  • Describe high data rate, short range wireless systems

Target Audience

Nontechnical personnel working with the RF and wireless industry will benefit from this course. Engineers and technicians with limited RF experience will also benefit. There are no prerequisites for this course.

Outline

Day One

RF Principles and Terminology
 • RF energy- what is it ? • The characteristics of RF waves • Understanding basic RF terms: Frequency, wavelength, power, occupied bandwidth • The magic of RF propagation • Connecting all the building blocks through transmission lines • Defining RF performance: Return Loss, VSWR, Reflection Coefficient, S-parameters • Electrical Signal Principles: Time and frequency, voice and video, digitizing of analog signals, data, bit error rate (BER)

Day Two

Basic RF System Architectures
 • The basic building blocks of transmitters and receivers: - oscillators - mixers - attenuators - amplifiers and filters • Defining system performance terms: Dynamic range, noise figure, minimum detectable signal, intermodulation distortion• 3rd order Intercept point (IP3) • Modulation and multiple access techniques (OFDM, OFDMA, BPSK, QPSK, QAM). • Antenna principles • Using link budgets to model performance • The fundamentals of operating systems: WCDMA, LTE, Wi-Fi(802.11), Bluetooth, WiMAX