2015 journal article

Passive Intermodulation Distortion in Antennas

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, 63(2), 474–482.

co-author countries: United States of America πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ
author keywords: Antenna distortion; intermodulation distortion; microstrip patch antenna; nonlinear distortion; passive intermodulation distortion (PIM); two-tone test
Source: Web Of Science
Added: August 6, 2018

An analytic formulation of passive intermodulation distortion (PIM) in antennas is presented for PIM introduced by electro-thermal modulation of conductivity by current-related losses. A silver rectangular patch antenna was fabricated using a sapphire substrate isolating the thermal process from other possible sources. Two-tone testing at 990 MHz using a sweep of the tone separation from 3 Hz to 100 kHz is reported. Both transmitted and reflected PIM are characterized using a high dynamic range two-tone test system incorporating an analog canceler achieving a dynamic range of 125 dB at 1-Hz tone separation for reflection measurements, and 100 dB at 10-Hz tone separation for transmission measurements with each tone set to 32.3 dBm.