So I'm planning out a shortwave radio receiver design, and I've been reading up on theory, and looking at other designs and such, and I had a few questions.
1. A lot of ham designs use RF transformers from the antenna input into the rest of the circuit. Up 'till now I've assumed that the transformer has been for impedance matching. If I've been assuming correctly, then what makes the RF transformer method so much more desirable than, say, an emitter follower (other than the fact that an emitter follower needs to be biased correctly) ?