Study on Power Capacities of Three Types of Wideband Tapered Baluns

Tapered balun is the most commonly used feed structure in ultrawideband tightly coupled dipole antenna array (TCDA). The tapered balun used in TCDA is usually manufactured by printed circuit board technology. When the power fed into the balun exceeds its power capacity, the printed circuit board may suffer thermal failure, which will affect the performance of TCDA. In this paper, the power capacities of the linear tapered balun, exponential tapered balun, and Doph-Tchebycheff tapered balun are analyzed and compared using the multi-physical simulation and prototyping test. The simulation and experimental results indicate that, the linear tapered balun has lower temperature rise and higher power capacity than the other two kinds of balun under natural heat dissipation conditions.