ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a basic tutorial on key aspects of wireless communication systems. It focuses on antennas as transducers of radio waves, radio propagation in the wireless communication channels with emphasis on land communication channels. The chapter presents specific propagation models for various land environments with a view to understanding the main propagation characteristics in such environments, such as path loss, and slow and fast fading effects. It discusses cellular concept for wireless systems and a strategy for cell design. The effectiveness of each wireless communication system depends on noise inside it, which in the literature is separated into the additive and the multiplicative noise. In real communication channels, the radio waves reach the receiver in a multipath situation in which the various waves arrive with different radiopaths and time delays. There is a wide variety of available antenna systems used in different areas of wireless communications.
