High peak power dielectric resonator oscillator combiner

The author describes an approach that achieves significant amounts of peak power from an oscillator, dielectrically stabilized, and power combined, in one stage. The active elements used were stacked Gunn diodes operating in X- and Ku-bands. 40 W and 112 W of peak power were measured from two-diode and four-diode DRO/combiners respectively, operating in X-band (9.3 GHz), and 13.5 W of peak power was measured from a two-diode DRO/combiner in Ku-band (16.3 GHz). The approach presented makes possible the production of sources with fewer active devices, and reduces the number of circulators and isolators needed to achieve the same amount of output power (versus the conventional approach of using a low-level DRO followed by a cascade of amplifier/power combiner stages).<>