Experimental and numerical study of microwave breakdown in a two-channel output multiplexer

This paper deals with the microwave breakdown phenomenon that can appear in output multiplexer filters for telecommunications satellites. The first objective of this paper is to describe summarily the phenomenon. The second objective is to validate the theoretical modeling by experimental tests on a realistic example. A two-channel OMUX at Ka band has been designed and built and a dedicated measurement procedure has been proposed. As it will be shown, the experimental results agree well with the theoretical one.