Compact design of high-temperature superconducting duplexer and triplexer for satellite communications

This paper presents a compact C-band high-temperature superconducting (HTS) input module duplexer, which can be scaled to a triplexer. The duplexer includes a common node as the input port, which is an extensible and effective structure for integrating a HTS multiplexer on a single superconducting film. The input node is realized by an open-loop microstrip line, which resonates at the frequency in the guard band between the two channels. In addition two four-pole bandpass filters consisting of rectangular spiral line resonators are used as output channels of the device. The duplexer is designed at 3995 MHz with a bandwidth of 226 MHz. The frequency ranges of the two channels are 3882–3942 MHz and 4048–4108 MHz, respectively. It is fabricated using double-sided Y Ba2Cu3O7 (YBCO) thin films on a piece of 30×  10 mm 2 MgO substrate. The experimental results show that the insertion loss is less than 0.1 dB for both channel filters and the isolation between the two channels is higher than 40 dB. Good agreement has been achieved between simulations and measurements to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Moreover, the triplexer is also designed and measured and the scalability is verified by simulation and experiments.