Practical Electronics for Inventors

Striking the right balance between theory & practice

My physical copy of Practical Electronics for Inventors arrived today. It’s a real chonker!

A hand holding up the thick fourth edition paperback of Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk.
All 1000-odd pages of the fourth edition.

I decided to buy it as a nice reference for my electronics projects and to augment my understanding of the material covered in the weekly amateur radio lessons I’m taking in preparation for the exam in October, after which I should hopefully have my licence!

Today’s class involved filters, and oh boy, does this book have a decent chapter on them! I’m diving into the theory (some of which is revision). I’m also going to play around and build a few filters of my own that I’ll test with a LibreVNA.

The book open at the start of Chapter 9, Filters, showing a diagram of low-pass, high-pass, bandpass and notch filters with their frequency responses.
Chapter 9 opens with the four major filter types and their responses, with Hiebel's Fundamentals of Vector Network Analysis lurking in the corner.

Another long-form blog post with the results, added to my TODOs? Probably.

I guess I need to get these drafts published sooner rather than later.