[amelius]

This is true, although for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering, not research. That's why I said fab, not lab. But yes, you are right to a great extent. The main point is that the hard EE work can be prohibitively expensive for individuals and smaller companies.

[pclmulqdq]

I think you're oversimplifying this. Lots of RF research is done with a DAC, an ADC, an FPGA, and a frontend made of discretes (sometimes also with off-the-shelf boxes connected with SMA connectors). A lot of power electronics research is done with microcontrollers and discrete parts. Digital circuits research often stops on an FPGA or in a simulator.

You can do a lot of actual original work without a fab.

[rramadass]

Can you recommend some good resources (books/videos/etc.) for studying RF Engineering and doing RF Research by oneself?

Assume beginner knowledge of relevant mathematics/electronics and good software skills.

Am interested in both the practical side (eg. build a SDR from components) and the theoretical side i.e. the Physics/Mathematics to explain it.

[nudgeee]

Sibling poster did a good job explaining how research relies on labs.

Agree that complex EE work can be expensive for individual and smaller companies, indeed :)

A comment on the application side:

> "[..] for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering"

Zoom out to the system level, and you cannot just rely on IC vendor recommendations, and this kind of engineering can still require access to $$ labs.

Similar to complex software systems: for example take a large scale distributed system made out of many individual frameworks and services. The system as a whole may now exhibit emergent behaviour, and have failure modes due to the complexity of the system.

Same happens in complex EE designs, your design might pack in multiple cutting edge RF radios such as mmWave, UWB, with bespoke power amplifier, detection and antenna designs. Add in EM from multiple clock domains, high power distribution circuits, digital noise from FPGAs/CPUs, and EM from nearby sources. You can easily have noise couple from sources causing unintended issues in other subsystems. The vendor may say "keep a way from sources of noise", but your application may still be to engineer a solution that fits in the design envelope of a modern smartphone. The system level design needs to be engineered for EMC and coexist/desense, and validated which takes a ton of lab simulation and measurement/characterization work.