Hams are notoriously cheap. Well, you can’t beat free, can you? If you think so, too, then these books from Michigan Publishing Services, may be for you. Michigan Publishing Services is the publishing arm of the University of Michigan, and you can freely download the PDF versions of a wide variety of their books.
This month’s edition of their newsletter, The Voracious Reader, features several electrical engineering books. If you really want to dig deep into the theory behind amateur radio and electronics, here’s your chance.
You can find the entire selection of EE books offered by Michigan Publishing by going here. But, the first title to catch my eye was Digital Communications: Modulation, Coding, and Information Theory. Digital modes are a big deal in amateur radio today, and if you really want to understand the theory behind packet radio and FT8, I suggest you give this book a go.
The second book to catch my eye was Electromagnetics for Engineers by Fawwaz T. Ulaby. In addition to as much vector mathematics as you can stomach, there’s an interesting Timeline of Electromagnetics, starting with the ancient Greeks and ending with the Palm Piilot in 1997. That’s kind of an odd ending point, but the first edition of the book was published in 1997. Other chapters of interest to hams are Maxwell’s Equations, Transmission Lines, and Radiation and Antennas.
Other books that you might find interesting that are available for free include:
- Signals and Systems: Theory and Applications, 2nd Edition
- Modern Communications Systems
- Circuit Analysis and Design, 3rd Edition
- Image Processing for Engineers
To download the books, you have to fill out a form that asks for your email address, your name, the course number, and the name of your college or university. You can enter a bogus name and email address, and for the latter two fiels, simply type in “n/a.” The website didn’t complain at all when I did so, and I was able to download the PDF files.
Let me know if you actually do download one or more of these books and what you think about them.