Broadband characterization of planar whispering-gallery-mode dielectric resonators using a simple experimental setup

A simple and cost-effective experimental setup for measuring the transmission coefficient of whispering-gallery (WG) mode dielectric resonators up to the mm-wave band is presented. The proposed setup consists of a sweep generator, a spectrum analyzer and a PC with a General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB). The major advantage of such arrangement lies in the ease of measurement without standard calibration procedures as well as its cost-effectiveness. Using this setup, two WG resonators have been experimentally characterized over the K- and Ka-bands. The obtained results are in a good agreement with those obtained from a calibrated vector network analyzer.