I fell in love with electronics and radio, and got my ham license, based on a book that I swiped from my local library (https://www.amazon.com/Elements-radio-Prentice-Hall-industri...). It took a person step by step up through complexity, saying "this is good but it has this problem and the next step is to fix it with ...". But that was the 70's. Are there any books that take the same approach to today's electronics, and radio in particular?
Frankly, the latest stuff, with Q and god-knows what, leave me scratching my head.
Today's electronics is mostly done by big semiconductor companies.
The sad reality is that today's hobbyists merely read datasheets and glue together existing ICs. You simply can't make a WiFi transceiver out of discrete components.
You simply can't make a WiFi transceiver out of discrete components.
That sounds like a challenge... given that someone has already done something similar with a GPS receiver:
You could probably do WiFi with an SDR with an FPGA, but that's about as much as a hobbyist could probably pull off.