Which frequency measurement method is more suitable for RF signals from 200MHz to 915MHz?
Your 43 year old book might be just a little bit behind the times. But in those terms, &quot;prescaling&quot; is your best bet, because it involves the least amount of circuitry that needs to handle the high frequency input.
Since you want to pick the signal out of the air, you'll need an antenna, a buffer amplifier and a &quot;slicer&quot; to convert the RF signal to digital, all running at the carrier frequency. You feed that to a prescaler chip, and then do frequency counting on the output of that chip, probably using a microcontroller that has suitable timer/counter hardware on-board.
Your MCU firmware performs the measurement and formats it for your display device.