About the Author

Ronald Quan has a BSEE degree from the University of California at Berkeley and is a member of SMPTE, IEEE, and the AES. With a General Radiotelephone license, he has worked as a broadcast and maintenance engineer for FM and AM radio stations, and he also holds an Extra Class amateur radio license. Before becoming a design engineer, he worked in TV-Radio-HiFi repair shops.

He is the author of Build Your Own Transistor Radios (McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics, 2012) and Electronics from the Ground Up (McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics, 2014).

For over 30 years he has worked for companies related to video and audio equipment (Ampex, Sony, Macrovision, Monster Cable, and Portal Player). At Ampex, he designed CRT (cathode ray tube) TV monitors and low-noise preamplifiers for audio and video circuits. Other designs included wide-band FM detectors for an HDTV tape recorder at Sony Corporation, and a twice color subcarrier frequency (7.16 MHz) differential phase measurement system at Macrovision, where he was a Principal Engineer. Also at Macrovision he designed several phase lock loop circuits to provide a regenerated clock signal from the raw EFM (eight-fourteen modulation) data stream from a CD player.

At Hewlett Packard, working in the field of opto-electronics, he developed a family of low-powered bar code readers, which used a fraction of the power consumed by conventional light pen readers.

Currently, he is the holder of more than 450 worldwide patents (which includes over 90 United States patents) in the areas of analog video processing, video signal noise reduction, low-noise amplifier design, low-distortion voltage-controlled amplifiers, wide-band crystal voltage-controlled oscillators, video monitors, audio and video IQ modulation, in-band carrier audio single-sideband modulation and demodulation, audio and video scrambling, bar code reader products, and audio test equipment.

Also, he has served as an Adjunct Lecturer and Lecturer in Stanford University’s Electrical Engineering Department.