Performance analysis of the enhanced microwave multiplexing networks for applications in communications satellites

In this paper, the performance improvements and limitations of the enhanced microwave multiplexer are thoroughly studied for applications in communications satellites considering in-band flatness of gain and group delay, out-of-band rejection, temperature stability and insertion loss. The overall performance of the enhanced multiplexer with M^th order channel filters is similar to conventional design with M+1^th order channel filters. It is shown that the difference in the coefficients of thermal expansion of the materials for the channel filters and the manifold has an effect on the multiplexer temperature stability. Impact of channel filter resonator Q factor and fractional bandwidth on the passband insertion loss is also demonstrated using different designs.