Reconfigurable L-Band 1:4 Wilkinson Power Divider Used in Phased Array Antenna

Abstract

Most of the significant parameters such as isolation loss,insertion loss and return loss are affected due to the design of multiband power dividers as a result of termination, discontinuties,structure of the device, mismatching losses and manufacturing tolerances. Amplitude and phase imbalace also destabilize the operation of the power divider.To overcome these limitations, the current  paper presents reconfigurable  L-band  Wilkinson Power Divider (WPD)  with 3 sections of 2-way WPD operating at 2.45GHz as per feed network used in a phased array antenna.It plays a significant role in communication systems because of its charachteristics such as a simple configuration, matching of impedance and reciprocal in nature. However in terms of size,the power divider that is proposed, is comparitively large (120 cm²⁾ due to the fact that six λ/4 impedance transformers are used in the design. Simulated and measured results are validated using S-parameters.Experimental results show that the isolation and return loss are -20dB and -11.6dB respectively. An insertion loss of -7.55dB which is below -3dB indicates that the output power  divides the power in the ratio of 1:4.Thus we strongly recommend the proposed power divider in phase array antenna system.