Development of Transient Electric Field Sensor Based on Microstrip Line

A kind of electric field sensor based on microstrip line for transient field measurement is designed, analyzed and tested in this paper. The coupling of the microstrip line to electromagnetic wave is introduced firstly. A method of recovering the incident electric field is proposed to recover the incident electric field by waveform processing. An electro-optical converting circuit is employed to convert the coupling signal to the optical signal. The numerical analysis results indicate that the upper limit of the -3 dB bandwidth of the sensor without the electro-optical converting circuit is 1.7 GHz. The experimental results show that the field waveform recovered by the sensor is highly similar to the incident field waveform. This kind of sensor can be used to measure transient field.