A novel trifilar coupled line splitter-balun for wideband antennas

The paper presents an edge-coupled structure consisting of three conductor strips for designing a splitter-balun for a wideband impulse radiating antenna (IRA). An IRA prototype was developed with the intention of using it for radio frequency interference (RFI) measurement at the South African radio telescope site (Karoo). We study electromagnetic coupling into the coupled line balun using a computational model and a designed prototype. Our time domain simulation results show a favourably good trend compared to measurement. A time domain technique is favoured in this study due to improved measurement and simulation times but S-parameter frequency domain analysis on our measured results has also been performed.