The days of troubleshooting a piece of gear armed only with a scope, voltmeter, and a general idea of how the hardware works are gone forever. As technology continues to drive equipment design forward, maintenance difficulties will continue to increase, and those responsible for maintaining this equipment will continue to struggle to keep up.

The Electronic Systems Maintenance Handbook, Second Edition establishes a foundation for servicing, operating, and optimizing audio, video, computer, and RF systems. Beginning with an overview of reliability principles and properties, a team of top experts describes the steps essential to ensuring high reliability and minimum downtime. They examine heat management issues, grounding systems, and all aspects of system test and measurement. They even explore disaster planning and provide guidelines for keeping a facility running under extreme circumstances.

Today more than ever, the reliability of a system can have a direct and immediate impact on the profitability of an operation. Advocating a carefully planned, systematic maintenance program, the richly illustrated Electronic Systems Maintenance Handbook helps engineers and technicians meet the challenges inherent in modern electronic equipment and ensure top quality performance from each piece of hardware.

Although it is one of the oldest sectors of electronics and now somewhat taken for granted, radio frequency transmission literally changed our world. Today, it is still the backbone of myriad applications, from broadcasting to electronic counter-measures. The wide variety of hardware in use means that those working in the field must be familiar with a multitude of principles and applications, but finding an up-to-date, comprehensive source for this background material has been difficult, if not impossible.

The RF Transmission Systems Handbook addresses the underlying concepts, operation, and maintenance of high-power RF devices, transmission lines, and antennas for broadcast, scientific, and industrial use. Focusing on devices and systems that produce more than one kilowatt of output power, the handbook explores the following major topics:

Applications: The common uses of radio frequency energy
Fundamental principles: The basic technologies, concepts, and techniques used in RF transmission
Power vacuum devices: The principles and applications of gridded vacuum tubes and microwave power devices
Solid-state power devices: The operating parameters of semiconductor-based power devices
RF components and transmission lines: The operation of hardware used to combine and conduct RF power
Antenna systems: The different types of antennas and their basic operating parameters
Troubleshooting: Basic troubleshooting techniques and the operation of important test instruments

Contrary to the perceptions of many, RF technology remains a dynamic field that continues to advance to higher power levels and higher frequencies. Those who specify, install, and maintain RF equipment will welcome this reference that uniquely serves their needs.

This lecture covers the fundamentals of spread spectrum modulation, which can be defined as any modulation technique that requires a transmission bandwidth much greater than the modulating signal bandwidth, independently of the bandwidth of the modulating signal. After reviewing basic digital modulation techniques, the principal forms of spread spectrum modulation are described. One of the most important components of a spread spectrum system is the spreading code, and several types and their characteristics are described. The most essential operation required at the receiver in a spread spectrum system is the code synchronization, which is usually broken down into the operations of acquisition and tracking. Means for performing these operations are discussed next. Finally, the performance of spread spectrum systems is of fundamental interest and the effect of jamming is considered, both without and with the use of forward error correction coding. The presentation ends with consideration of spread spectrum systems in the presence of other users. For more complete treatments of spread spectrum, the reader is referred to [1, 2, 3].