Interaction Between Switched Oscillator Sources and Their Loading Antennas in Determining System Performance

Switched oscillators (SWOs) are compact mesoband sources for high-peak-power applications. SWOs create a quarter-wave standing wave oscillation by initiating a self-breakdown, short-circuit at one end of the SWO and an open circuit at the other. Often, the open-circuit condition is replaced with a high-impedance load, such as an antenna. However, the presence of an antenna impacts the oscillation performance, and characteristics such as spectral content are quite different for the combined system than expected from separate analyses of the SWO and antenna. Although significant efforts have been made in the literature to study and model the SWO, there is a gap in the understanding of the interaction between the source and any particular load antenna. In this work, several antennas commonly used with SWO systems are modeled to gain a better understanding of the impact of the antenna’s geometry and impedance on the system’s overall performance. Using a combination of circuit and full-wave modeling, the aspects of the loading antenna that have the greatest impact on overall system performance are identified.