Baluns are an essential item in the feed structure of many antenna elements requiring a balanced input. They may be trivial structures such as simple lengths of co-axial line or a 'sleeve', but when required to function over a broad bandwidth, at significant power, well matched and with minimal losses, within the element pitch of an electronically scanned array, the task of designing such a device can become complex.
The development of a broad band balun for an Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) based on Highly CoupledDipole (HCD) elements is described. The immersed element was designed to function over two octaves or a 4:1 impedance bandwidth, (covering either the 2.7-10.8GHz or 4.5-18GHz frequency range) at the 2:1 VSWR level, and hence a broad-band balun with at least this bandwidth was required.
Keywords-balun, transformer, power divider, wide-band phased array; multi-functional aperture.I.
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