Fundamentals of Information Processes 2 (Morhal, 2012)

The companion volume to the signals course, same author and year, covering everything that happens once the signal leaves the wire. It splits cleanly in two: chapters grounded in physics and physiology, which age well, and chapters describing deployed networks, which describe the world of 2012 and have been overtaken.

The durable half #

Propagation and the range equation. Free-space attenuation, noise sources — thermal, atmospheric, man-made — antenna efficiency, and then the received-power budget that ties them together. This is the calculation that decides whether a link exists at all, and it has not changed: the physics of spreading loss and thermal noise is not a technology generation.

Antennas get a full chapter — dipoles and vibrator arrays, reflector (dish) antennas, magnetic and loop antennas, wideband designs, with gain, directivity and working band treated as parameters you trade against each other rather than as properties a datasheet hands you.

Receiver architectures are developed historically, which is the right way to teach them: crystal set, direct amplification, regenerative, super-regenerative, then superheterodyne with single frequency conversion. Each step exists because the previous one failed at a specific thing — selectivity, sensitivity, stability — so the superheterodyne stops being an arbitrary block diagram.

Electroacoustics, hearing, and speech processing. Acoustic fields and wave models, radiators, microphones, loudspeaker heads, room sound reinforcement and reverberation; then nonlinear hearing, loudness, pitch, temporal and spatial perception; then speech intelligibility, denoising and equalization. These chapters now split cleanly into fields and transducers, hearing and psychoacoustics, and speech coding, because the physical field, listener model, and transmission representation have different evidence and failure modes.

Hydroacoustics covers active and passive sonar structure, cavitation, reverberation, and figures of merit. It now has a current standalone destination in sonar and underwater acoustics, where the course mechanism is paired with current ISO/IEC measurement terminology and calibration boundaries.

RF metrology and monitoring is a substantial late block, not an appendix: automated frequency measurement, spectrum/instantaneous-frequency/FFT/counter methods, error sources, electromagnetic field-strength measurement, broadcast and satellite monitoring, and technical radio control. It now maps to RF measurement and spectrum monitoring rather than being hidden inside receiver architecture.

The remaining chapter map includes radio-system quality metrics; amateur-radio modes, bands, and operating shorthand; broadcast receiver chains and stereo systems; radar/radio control; television and image transport; then cellular, satellite, and analogue/digital trunked radio. The amateur-radio chapter is useful regional history but does not justify its own technology-neutral territory topic.

The dated half #

The TDMA frame section is the one systems chapter worth reading on its own terms: time-slot allocation, the cost of guard intervals, and how frame structure caps subscriber capacity is a mechanism argument, not a product description, and it transfers directly to any shared-medium scheduling problem.

How to cite it #

Use this source for propagation, budgets, antennas, receiver evolution and acoustics. For anything describing a live network, treat it as evidence of what was true in 2012 and pair it with a current source — or leave it uncited. A good teacher is not a reason to attribute a claim that no longer holds.

Source claims audit #