TABLE OF CONTENTS Filters occur so frequently in the instrumentation and communications industries that no book covering the field of RF circuit design could be complete without at least one chapter devoted to the subject. Indeed, entire books have been written on the art of filter design alone, so this single chapter cannot possibly cover all aspects of all types of filters. But it will familiarize you with the characteristics of four of the most commonly used filters and will enable you to design very quickly and easily a filter that will meet, or exceed, most of the common filter requirements that you will encounter.
We will cover Butterworth, Chebyshev, and Bessel filters in all of their common configurations: low-pass, high-pass, bandpass, and bandstop. We will learn how to take advantage of the attenuation characteristics unique to each type of filter. Finally, we will learn how to design some very powerful filters in as little as 5 minutes by merely looking through a catalog to choose a design to suit your needs.
In Chapter 2, the concept of resonance was explored and we determined the effects that component value changes had on resonant circuit operation. You should now be somewhat familiar with the methods that are used in analyzing passive resonant circuits to find quantities, such as loaded Q, insertion loss, and bandwidth. You should also be capable of designing one- or two-resonator circuits for any loaded Q desired (or, at least, determine why you cannot). Quite a...
