A Novel Design for a Circular Waveguide Directional Coupler

In this paper, a study of the coupling between a rectangular waveguide and circular waveguide is presented, aimed at developing a design procedure for a rectangular to circular waveguide directional coupler. Since radio-astronomical receivers often exploit circular horns, a coupler sharing the same waveguide type is at a premium, and furthermore, it reduces the feeding network complexity in dual polarization applications. A novel approach for obtaining traveling wave modal amplitude coefficients is presented, suitable for modes of any order. This approach is used to analyze the behavior of a single hole coupler between a rectangular and circular waveguide. From this starting point, a four holes directional coupler with good performance is designed in the 22-GHz band. Measurements and full-wave numerical simulations show excellent agreement with the proposed theory.