20W Full Octave Amplifiers in S- and C-Band

The tremendous growth of commercial communications has brought about an increased demand for high power solid state devices with good linearity and thus a need for sophisticated characterization techniques at high power levels. At the same time, even though the frequency bands utilized for commercial communications are typically quite narrow, they are becoming so numerous that they almost fill the entire spectrum. It becomes therefore highly desirable to characterize devices working in different frequency bands without changing the measuring set-up. This paper describes two wideband amplifiers designed to provide a high power source in a device characterization system. Each amplifier covers several popular commercial bands and the coverage of the two amplifiers overlaps slightly so that, when used together, they provide a powerful source with over 43 dBm of power all the way from 1.8 GHz to 8 GHz.