A Novel Technique for the External Coupling of Coaxial Dielectric Microwave Filters
Résumé
Coaxial dielectric resonators made from materials
with high relative permittivity, including ceramics, have good
temperature stability and quality factors of the order of 1000
in the UHF band. At these frequencies, large wavelengths are
disadvantageous from the point of view of size, but high dielectric
constants, up to 90, can be used to minimize them. However,
coupling the input/output of filters, i.e., their excitation, remains
a critical issue, especially when wide passbands are required.
The objective of this paper is to present a novel technique to
make this coupling, to solve problems that arise when using
classic techniques. The approach consists of nesting a conducting
rod in each central core of the input/output resonators, which
creates another coaxial TEM mode that will couple with the
fundamental TEM mode of the input/output resonator. The
length and/or position of the rod provide the opportunity to easily
and accurately tune input/output couplings over a wide dynamic
range. In this paper, we show the effectiveness of the solution,
presenting the experimental results of sixth-order filters centered
at 435 MHz, one made on the basis of a standard input/output
coupling and the other on the basis of the new solution proposed
here.