A 23 GHz high-temperature superconducting microstrip filter for radio astronomy

This paper reports a 6-pole high-temperature superconducting (HTS) microstrip bandpass filter for radio astronomy applications. The filter has a center frequency of 23 GHz and a bandwidth the 2 GHz. We have made many efforts, such as adopting 0.25-mm-thick substrate, carefully designing the housing box and filter layout, to solve the problems in realizing a K-band planar filter. A special straight-line half-wavelength resonator (center-widen resonator) was also designed to reduce the insertion loss of the filter. The measured results showed a midband insertion loss of 0.11 dB with a ripple of 0.4 dB, and a return loss better than 11.5 dB. Good agreement was obtained between simulated and measured results.