A Wideband Balun for HF, VHF, and UHF Applications

There is an industry need for wideband baluns to operate across several decades of bandwidth covering the HF, VHF, and UHF spectrum. For readers unfamiliar with the term "balun," it is a compound word that combines the terms balanced and unbalanced. This is in reference to the conversion between a balanced source and an unbalanced load, often requiring an impedance transformation of some type. It\´s common in literature to see the terms "balanced" and "unbalanced" used interchangeably with the terms "differential" and "single-ended," and this article will also share this naming convention. These devices are particularly useful in network matching applications and can be constructed at low cost and a relatively small bill of materials. Wideband baluns first found widespread use converting the balanced load of a dipole antenna to the unbalanced output of a single-ended amplifier. These devices can also be found in solid-state differential circuits such as amplifiers and mixers where network matching is required to achieve the maximum power transfer to the load. In the design of RF power amplifiers, wideband baluns play a critical role in an amplifier\´s performance, including its input and output impedances, gain flatness, linearity, power efficiency, and many other performance characteristics.This article describes the theory of operation, design procedure, and measured results of the winning wideband balun presented at the 2013 IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) International Microwave Symposium (IMS2013), sponsored by the MTT-17 Technical Coordinating Committee on HF-VHF-UHF technology. The wideband balun was designed to deliver a 4:1 impedance transformation, converting a balanced 100 Ω source to an unbalanced 25 Ω load. It was constructed using a multiaperture ferrite core and a pair of bifilar wires with four parallel turns.