Compact Ridge Waveguide Gysel Combiner

A novel wide-band compact ridge waveguide Gysel combiner is presented. It exhibits a 50% fractional bandwidth while occupying a very compact volume. The structure is useful in high power combiner applications. Gysel combiners offer a better bandwidth than traditional combiners, and provide relaxed requirements on the power handling capability of the terminating loads in case of fault conditions, which may result from imbalance culminating when one input is completely absent. Realization in ridge waveguide offers huge advantages such as bandwidth not attainable in rectangular waveguides, compactness, while exhibiting a relatively a high power handling capability. The proof of concept design was synthesized, simulated, fabricated and tested. Excellent test results are obtained with no tuning screws confirming the validity of the concept.