A curated list of the best technical ham radio books

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

There a numerous technical ham radio books out there that deal with every conceivable ham radio related matter ranging from antenna building over electronics to digital signal processing. This article attempts to become – over time and with your help – a curated list of the very best technical ham radio books.

Note: This article deliberately does not contain any links. I trust that you, dear reader, are perfectly capable of feeding them into the search engine of your choice and obtain your own copy, should you so desire.

Note: I also maintain a curated list of non-technical ham radio books that manage to capture and convey the magic of ham radio.

Experimental Methods in RF Design

ISBN-10: 087259923X

ISBN-13: 978-0872599239

Written by Wes Hayward W7ZOI, Rick Campbell KK7B and Bob Larkin W7PUA and published by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) in 2003 (with a revised edition having been published in 2009) EMRFD, as its colloquially referred to within ham radio circles is The bible in home-brewing your own radio equipment. While the book is out of print you can still pick up used copies for reasonable prices.

AMSATS and HAMSATS: Amateur Radio and other Small Satellites

ISBN-10: 1986039749

ISBN-13: 978-1986039741

Written by Andrew Barron ZL3DW and published in 2018 I picked up this book at the Ham Radio 2018 in Friedrichshafen. The author does a great job at covering all aspects of SATCOM (satellite communications) that are available to the connoisseur, from receivind and decoding of small satellite telemetry downlinks to two-way communication using space-borne ham radio relays.

If there are outstanding technical ham radio books that you feel should make it on the list, please let me know by commenting below.