Effects of Losses on the Current Spectrum of a Printed-Circuit Line

This paper studies the effects of practical conductor and dielectric losses on the high-frequency current excited on a microstrip line by a gap voltage source. The analysis shows that whereas losses cause an exponential decay in the propagating bound mode (as expected), the continuous-spectrum current is much less influenced by the presence of material losses. As a consequence, the nature of the strip current far away from the source is dramatically affected by the presence of losses, and will be dominated by the continuous spectrum. This results in unusual behavior that is observed for the strip current far away from the source.