A balanced sub-harmonic mixer for EHF satellite communications

Abstract

In this letter, a balanced sub-harmonic mixer based on a dual-mode ring coupler is proposed for EHF satellite communications. Theoretical analysis is given to show that the proposed balanced sub-harmonic mixer has the ability to suppress the odd harmonics of LO and its mixed products. It can improve the poor spurious suppression performance commonly encountered with traditional sub-harmonic mixer. A balanced sub-harmonic mixer based on the proposed structure is designed and fabricated. Measurement results show the mixer achieves good performance in terms of conversion loss and spurious suppression.