Present design and perspectives of resonant combiners based on rectangular corrugated waveguides

The power from multiple sources can be combined or distributed to separate outputs using a new generation of devices recently developed. A family of these is based on the splitting properties of a rectangular corrugated waveguide characterised by a proper length and fed with a beam in a suitable geometry. A prototype based on a couple of resonat-ing loops including these waveguide splitters has been measured at low power at 105 GHz. A report is given on the measurements, the align-ment and the tuning procedures. A study on optics and on input con-figuration is required in order to guarantee a minimum degradation of performances in real applications. Configurations with side-input cou-pling to the waveguide and astigmatic beams in input are presented. They may drastically reduce the overall waveguide length, without per-formance degradation. The possibility to split beam power in unequal ratios using waveguides with fractional length allows a spectrum of new applications for devices using rectangular corrugated waveguides, from non-3dB couplers to resonators coupling more than two channels.