Principles of Communications Satellites

This books is like the bible for Satellite Communications. I recommend this book to engineers and technicians working on the space community.

Great for a graduate level course in space communications. It would be good, though, to have an instructor's edition.

Great book

This text was required for a college course in Satellite Communications. This book is one of the BEST at explaining satellite operations and space communications principles. I used the Wertz/Larson "SMAD" book in previous classes and was puzzled by its explanation of several space communications concepts such as EIRP and Power Flux Density. This book gives simple, common-sense explanations for these types of concepts. The first chapter alone gave me more of a complete understanding of communications satellite systems than anything I read in Wertz/Larson.Many of the calculations presented in this book involve decibels and logarithms and a math review would be helpful for most people. Since most communications calculations in general are done in decibels, this math is unavoidable but easily mastered with a little high school math review.A good complement for this text is the book "Silicon Sky" by Gary Dorsey. This is the story of Orbital Sciences Corp/Orbcomm which is attempting to build a private communications satellite system. For a "business history" book, it gets surprisingly deep into the details of communications satellite engineering and provides a good real-world context for understanding the material in "Principles of Communications Satellites".