Practical RF Projects & Case Studies#

Learning by building and breaking.

RF theory becomes real when something gets built and it doesn’t work the way the textbook said it should. This section collects practical projects, experiments, and postmortems from actual RF builds — the mistakes, the surprises, and the lessons that only come from hands-on experience.

Every entry here is meant to connect theory to practice. Simple transmitters, antenna experiments, SDR explorations, and debugging stories all serve the same purpose: building the intuition that comes from working with real RF circuits in real environments.

What This Section Covers#

• Simple Transmitters & Receivers — Building the most basic RF circuits: crystal oscillators, AM transmitters, direct conversion receivers, and superheterodyne architecture.
• Antenna Tuning Experiments — Hands-on antenna building, measurement, and tuning with real before-and-after data.
• RF Mistakes & Postmortems — Detailed accounts of RF failures and the lessons extracted from each one.
• Enclosure Effects on RF Systems — How metal and plastic enclosures change RF behavior, with measurement data and practical advice.
• SDR-Based Experiments — Using software-defined radio for receiving, decoding, and experimenting with real-world signals.
• Lessons Learned from Real Builds — Distilled wisdom from hands-on RF work: habits, principles, and hard-won rules of thumb.