Elec Warfare Recvrs & Recv.Sys (Electronic Warfare)

The biggest challenge to writing any book on electronic warfare (EW) is to give an in-depth review of the important concepts and developments without divulging classified information. This book, sizable as it is, gives the reader who is or is intending to work in the area of electronic warfare relevant information while still remaining unclassified. All of the topics discussed can be found in the open literature but the author has saved readers a lot of browsing and search time by including the most important ones. Readers requiring more specialized or in-depth discussion may find that this type of information is not publicly available. Due to its size, there is a lot in this book to absorb, but no doubt readers who decide to commit to its study will not read it in its entirety but will instead topics of interest to them.Radio receivers of course are noisy entities, and the different noise contributions to receiver electronics are revealed quantitatively in this book, using primarily only elementary mathematical tools, instead of using the full theory of stochastic processes. That the level of mathematical details is kept at an elementary level will help readers who are interested primarily in the practical implementation of radio receivers in an EW environment. Readers who want a more sophisticated mathematical/theoretical treatment will have to consult another monograph or the research literature (which is relatively sparse because of security constraints).The first chapter is more of a bread-and-butter topic and definition list that covers the important metrics and performance parameters of EW receivers. EW network designers and EW network performance engineers frequently use these metrics, especially those who must configure military tactical networks so they they adhere here to performance requirements in an EW environment. The challenge of course in making a network function in such an environment is being able to distinguish friendly from un-friendly jamming/interference. In this regard, another very helpful feature of this book is that the author devotes considerable discussion on the difficulties in measuring the important quantities of interest, one example being the bandwidth. The author uses signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) instead of the SINR (signal-to-interference noise ratio) to frame the concept of receiver sensitivity. The SINR model of interference has been gaining in popularity in recent years, due mainly to is connection with network performance optimization and network capacity, both of which are very important considerations for networks in EW environments.The author also includes a discussion of random modulation in the book, which is somewhat atypical and helpful to readers who are interested in how randomness can be used in radio communications. Contrary to what one’s intuition might indicate, the deliberate incorporation of randomness can greatly assist in optimizing radio communication performance. The discussion on random modulation could be viewed as the most complex in the book from a mathematical standpoint.Although still not widely used in military tactical networks, but definitely coming in the future, is that of cellular technology. The issue of how to place base stations is the main inhibitor in implementing this kind of technology in military tactical networks, but whatever eventual decisions are made will no doubt have to respect some of the considerations that the author includes in this book, particularly in this discussion of CDMA. When studying this part of the book, it is interesting to learn for example that uplinks in cellular networks require power control of 1 dB in accuracy and about 1 kbps of control data. Measurement error may prohibit such an accuracy in real networks, but even if this is dealt with, it goes beyond saying that power control in tactical networks is very important from the standpoint of EW network coordination and scheduling.At least from the standpoint of the reviewer, who needed to learn these topics, the most important parts of the book dealt with the different stages of radio receiver electronics, and how each can essentially act as a noise source and the degree to which RF amplifiers determine the receiver sensitivity. Network designers, engineers, and analysts need to have an appreciation of the different factors contributing to noise in EW receivers, and this book will definitely assist them in gaining the necessary insight.

The contents of this book are rather weak and unbalanced. Many basic topics are covered in a too detailed manner, and some other topics really of interest for electronic warfare, are somehow superficially discussed. On top of that, the MS Word edition of this book makes the reading quite awful, particularly the maths content which looks terrible in this format. I cannot imagine any serious book not being edited using LaTeX format.