RF Engineering and the Link Budget

This chapter presents the engineering components of the radio spectrum management and standardization. To achieve a rational, equitable, efficient, and economical use of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum by all radio communication services, it is essential to understand the technical aspects of wireless media. The chapter analyses the characteristics of the wireless signals, transmitters, receivers, antennas, propagation, the link budget from transmitter to receiver and the ability of systems to share the RF spectrum. A special focus is the fundamental engineering techniques, which are the basis of the policies, regulations and standardization of radio spectrum management. The modulated RF signal can be represented in the time domain in three equivalent ways, namely polar representation, Cartesian (or quadrature) representation, and analytic signal representation. Minimizing interference is the main RF engineering goal of the radio spectrum management at the international, regional and national levels. Electromagnetic sharing is achieved by the separation in frequency, space and time domain.