A Compact Circular Waveguide Directional Coupler for High-Order Mode Vacuum Electronic Devices

In this paper, a compact circular waveguide directional coupler for high-order mode vacuum electronic devices is presented and investigated. To reduce the size, the primary and secondary waveguides of this coupler are connected in an orthogonal way by two coupling holes. Moreover, to improve the directivity and operating bandwidth, a method of loading adjustable metal stubs on the isolating port is proposed and introduced in design. A Ka-band TE01-mode circular waveguide directional coupler was designed, and the structure parameters were optimized by electromagnetic simulation. To verify the design, a prototype sample was fabricated, assembled, and tested. The experimental results show good agreement with the simulations, and the directivity are improved by adjusting the metal stubs on the isolating port. In the experiment, a 26.7 dB directivity at 35 GHz was obtained, and the bandwidth of directivity above 20 dB was higher than 7 GHz, corresponding to a relative bandwidth higher than 20%. Meanwhile, the TE01 degrees mode maintained good transmission efficiency in this compact high-order mode directional coupler.