Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> In today’s article, I’m hoping to provide an introduction to radio that’s free of ham jargon and advanced math.

Sounds great! Let’s dig in.

> … the fundamental mirroring behavior is still present, but it’s usually managed pretty well. Accidental mirror images of unrelated transmissions can be mitigated choosing the IF wisely, by designing the antenna to have a narrow frequency response, or by putting an RF lowpass filter in front of the mixer if needs be

Mission failed. Ah well.



Not really unless you refer to the use of 'IF' and 'RF'. Maybe it would have been better if they wrote these out as 'IF (intermediate frequency)' and 'RF (radio frequency)' with a link to explain in which context IF is used but for the rest that sentence looks OK to me.


The meaning of "mirroring behavior", "narrow frequency response", "lowpass filter", "mixer", "IF", "RF" are all unexplained both in this article and the listed prerequisite articles.

The meaning of "mixer" might be inferred from the earlier "the basic operation of almost every radio receiver boils down to mixing (multiplying) the amplified antenna signal with a sine wave of a chosen frequency." And the meaning of "mirroring behavior" might be inferred from the earlier "we can see that every peak of the driving signal reaches the ends of the antenna perfectly in-phase with the bounce-back from the previous oscillation". But these are still explanations that rely on a good amount of past expertise and other jargon not covered in this or the author's other pages, which probably has to involve quite a lot of what most people would consider "advanced math", though as always "advanced" is relative, or alternately a lot of direct experience playing with analog signals.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: