A 10-35-GHz six-channel microstrip multiplexer for wide-band communication systems

A six-channel multiplexer composed of parallel-coupled microstrip bandpass filters is developed. The passbands of the filters, i.e., channel frequencies, are 10, 12, 19, 21, 32, and 35 GHz. The operating frequency range of the multiplexer is so wide that a new method of harmonic suppression is devised for the filters designed at 10 and 12 GHz. The method is simple and does not require any change to the conventional parallel-coupled microstrip bandpass filter. A design procedure for the microstrip multiplexer is then introduced with a rule to set up initial conditions for better optimization. The designed multiplexer does not need any tuning elements, and the measurement results show insertion losses between 2.0-3.2 dB for all six channels. The multiplexer developed in this paper has been used in the wide-band transceiver system.