Design of a tapered coaxial resonator filter for mobile communications

The authors describe the design, a simple fabrication technique, and performance of a coaxial resonator filter with tapered inner conductors to be used in mobile radios. The effects of coupling, window area, and temperature on the performance of the filter have also been considered. The passband of the filter is 30 MHz with a center frequency of 925 MHz, 1.15-dB insertion loss, 0.8-dB ripple, and 14.7-dB return loss at the center frequency. The resonant frequency and coupling coefficient stabilities with temperature have been measured at 28.38 ppm/°C and 3.5×10^-4/°C, respectively. The 3-dB bandwidth is measured as 32 MHz and a sharp cutoff is observed at -16.5 dB with a bandwidth of 37 MHz for narrow scale and -65 dB with a bandwidth of 84 MHz for wide scale. The fabrication technique developed using a zinc-cast inner conductor and extruded aluminum outer conductor has better reproducibility than the conventional machining technique and is highly cost effective