Design of a Ku-Band High-Purity Transducer for the TM01 Circular Waveguide Mode by Means of T-Type Junctions

Abstract

A new mode transducer for converting the TE10 rectangular waveguide mode to the TM01 circular waveguide mode is presented. The novel topology is based on two T-type junctions with in-phase excitation at their input rectangular ports. The first one is an H-plane T-junction in rectangular waveguide. The second one differs from the standard E-plane T-junction in the excitation, which is carried out by modes excited with fields having the same in-phase polarization at the input rectangular ports, and has the output port in circular waveguide. This configuration exploits the symmetry of the modes under consideration to achieve a high-purity conversion, controlling the propagating circular waveguide TE11 mode to a maximum level of -42 dB in the whole operation band. The design bandwidth is 2 GHz centered at 12 GHz with a return loss level higher than 28 dB. In addition, the transducer can be divided in a main body plus a cover for easing the manufacturing. In order to verify the proposed geometry, a back-to-back arrangement has been measured connecting two similar aluminum transducers with four different angles between their rectangular ports (0°, 45°, 90°, and 180°). The excellent experimental results validate the novel transducer with a measured converting efficiency higher than 98.2% in a 16.7% relative frequency bandwidth.