Ridge Waveguide Technology and Ridge Gap Waveguide Technology: A Comparison

Ridge Gap waveguide (RGW) has been a famous metallic transmission line in microwave and antenna technology applications since 2009. This structure has many advantages, that have outweighed its disadvantages, especially in high-frequency applications. However, the similarity of this technology to the ridge waveguide (RW) raised the question about the effectiveness of this waveguide in comparison to the RW. In this paper, the insertion loss of RGW and RW is compared. This comparison shows in terms of loss in Ku band there is no evident difference between them. However, RGW shows slightly better power handling capability compared to RW. Gysel power divider (GPD) has been designed, simulated, and measured in Ku band with both structures to have a proper comparison. Both power dividers covered the Ku-band, and even the lower side of K band was partially covered. The measured result of both structures showed good agreement with the simulation, which means both of them have low sensitivity to manufacturing error in the intended bandwidth; Another aspect of this research is that the manufacturing cost of RW is noticeably lower than RGW, which should be considered when one of these technologies is being considered for large-scale production.