NuWaves Engineering, has announced that their bandpass filter designed for the GPS L1 band as part of their US Air Force Research Lab’s (AFRL) Technologically Advanced N-plexer has successfully completed its multi-paction testing. Multipaction is the phenomenon that can cause breakdown due to high electric fields in a vacuum or near vacuum. Devices in the output section of a satellite payload, including filters and multiplexers are subject to high RF power. This could lead to RF breakdown, which may render the specific device useless and, in the end, degrades the reliability of the satellite. Therefore all space high power devices have to be analyzed with regards to their
breakdown behavior. The testing was concluded under the GPS III Operation (TANGO) Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II project.
Leveraging NuWaves’s extensive filter and multiplexer design experience, the TANGO (Technology Advanced N-plexer for GPS III Operation) project uses an innovative slab-line combined cavity filter topology with dielectrically loaded cavities. This enables wider bandwidth operation to support flexible signal generation for digital modulation schemes, accommodate high power handling without increasing multi-paction or introducing unwanted PIM Exhibit low insertion loss to ensure optimum signal combining for downlink applications. It also helps reduce the size and weight of the n-plexer by approximately one-half versus the current GPS III tri-plexer.
The innovative TANGO technology offers a substantial size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) advantage over existing n-plexer solutions for high-power signal multiplexing in L-band (and higher bands) that could benefit a wide variety of space-based and terrestrial programs related to navigation, communications, telemetry.
The test results now enable NuWaves to help AFRL advance the state-of-the-art under the TANGO SBIR Phase II contract while also proving that the NuWaves TANGO design will raise the bar for space qualified components.
