Reddit reviews Practical Antenna Handbook 5/e

Pick up some books like the Practical Antenna Handbook, or ARRL Antenna Handbook, or consult Antenna-Theory are my three go-tos.

This book is the bomb:

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Antenna-Handbook-5-e/dp/0071639586

If you can find this book at your local library, or from a local ham, it is definitely one of the best single sources out there. It's complex in places, but you can skim through the math without losing a lot of the big-picture theory.

>How is it being reflected back?

It is very much the same mechanism that causes light to bend, and a small portion of it to be reflected, by a smooth water surface. A difference of impedance with an electrical wave is very much like the difference in refractive index between air and water when dealing with light.

> How do I do these calculations myself?

I don't bother doing them by hand, as the math is a bugger. This calculator usually works nicely for approximating it.

>I am also having a hard time understanding how impedance is even a variable since we are dealing with DC and not AC.

We are most definitely working with AC. The power to your radio might be DC, but when it leaves the antenna jack, it is Alternating Current that is switching back and forth at whatever frequency you're operating at. If you were to put an oscilloscope on the output of your radio, the only difference between the wave pattern it produced, and the wave pattern produced by mains AC would be the frequency and voltage.

I picked up a UV-82HP from Prime Day but my real catches were Gordo's Extra Class study guide, Carr's Practical Antenna Handbook, and H/H's Art of Electronics.

Here's to spending the rest of my summer in a book.

You've got a lot of good advice in this post that pretty much covers what I was gonna say. I can relate to you when you say that you really understand the subject by working through all the details and the math. However, I've found that when it's time to actually put theory to practice, a lot of times you can't do it directly because the problem at hand is way too complex. And like you said, that approach takes a very long time. So, a compromise I've made is that I just start doing the project, and then learn the theory in parallel. That way, you sort of start to get both the intuition and the solid foundations behind what you're trying to work on.

Also, a practical book I'd recommend is Practical Antenna Handbook. I've skimmed through it and it seems like a really good book to get a feeling for working with antennas. It's definitely on my to-read list. If you really want the nitty-gritty of antenna theory, I've heard good things about Balanis and Kraus.