ELEC5403 - Radio Frequency Engineering
Overview of the Unit
Hi there, and welcome to the WEB page for my class taking this 'Advanced' final year course in Semester 1, 2010. The aim of this WEB resource is to provide a central information point for my Sydney Uni students and also to make the material available for general use. If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know.
If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know.
A bit of philosophy!
A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit the most easterly point of Nova Scotia (in Canada) and found the following thoughtful writings on display – they are well worth a read:
KELTIC 1:
“The end of land
We belong to ocean and sky
The end of land
Clean air, clean water, food, gifts for all
Life
We ruin with pollution and greed
The end
No life
Cloud, ocean and sun
Empty
Waiting for time
Like the beginning”
KELTIC 2:
“Every summer in the early 1900s we'd fish by day and clean cod, mackerel, salmon or haddock in the evening. We still fish lobster May to July but in the 1980s the salmon berths and fish traps went. Now the cod are scarce.
We are fishing communities - without fish we don't exist.
Our children, our homes, our lives, our culture depend on catching fish in the ocean.”
Food for thought!!!
Course Description
This course aims to give you a good basic introduction to the understanding of Radio Frequency Design. I hope that I will be able to get you all to become enthusiastic and really enjoy this subject. The course is not aiming to develop you to become a super "Technician" who can put circuits together - rather it is trying to provide you with a nose/sense for commonsense in this area which will allow you to tell the difference between useful work (probably being done by a technician) and absolute B/S! As you move into your professional life you are are going to have to be able to distinguish between the two (to survive!)! That decision will never be easy and I guarantee you will all make mistakes - the trick is to learn as much as possible from those mistakes.
To do well in the course you will have to be dedicated, and I expect you to put in and work hard and enjoy. Good Luck!
Some feedback comments from students noted that they had missed the first lecture of one of my courses and they never caught up! That translates to - they never really tried by themselves and then approach a (very approachable!) lecturer to clear their problems!
The course starts off by revising basic introductory material and then builds SEQUENTIALLY. What that is saying is that you need to stay with and understand each SIMPLE step. You should try to really understand each Lecture before you attend the next one - I cannot emphasise enough the importance of staying with me. I do make the assumption that every student is interested and keen to move on to the next level! There will be a fair bit of computer material - DVD's, Powerpoints etc available so I do suggest that a memory stick will be very handy. All of that 'soft' material will also be available on the computer in the laboratory.
I will again be seriously trying to use the Internet extensively to add a new dimension to the course content. The Internet is revolutionizing education all over the world, and I believe that it has an important role to play in providing high quality educational material to students everywhere. I hope the material presented here will be another small step in that direction.