Chapter 1

Observations of radio pulsars carried out over the past four decades have provided a wealth of information about the properties of neutron stars. In this chapter, we review briefly the current state of our knowledge based on the roughly 1600 pulsars now known. For the purposes of this discussion, we consider three main areas: (a) pulsar emission properties used to help understand and constrain mechanisms for the radio emission; (b) interstellar propagation effects on the pulsar signal; (c) pulsar population properties and their implications for the Galactic population of neutron stars.