A wideband superconducting filter using strong coupling resonators for radio astronomy observatory

A 12-pole wideband superconducting microstrip bandpass filter, which has a fractional bandwidth of 38% and a center frequency of 1455 MHz, is presented for the Miyun 50-m radio astronomy telescope, Beijing, China. A novel resonator, which can not only generate very large coupling, but also push its first spurious resonant peak away from the passband, is introduced. A new style interleaved coupling structure is proposed and successfully used in this study to realize the remarkably required strong coupling. To achieve high edge slope on the high side of the passband, as required, a single transmission zero was introduced. The filter was fabricated on a 36 mm 30 mm 0.5 mm double-sided YBa film deposited on an MgO substrate. The measured results showed that the filter had 0.05-dB minimum insertion loss, 0.08-dB passband ripple, and 23-dB return loss at a temperature of 40 K. The first spurious peak did not appear until 2632 MHz. The overall measured performance showed good agreement with the simulation.