Design of a 7-Way Microstrip Divider for a Hexagonal Honeycomb Structure

This paper proposes a 7-way microstrip divider for hexagonal honeycomb structures. The honeycomb arrangement has advantages such as equidistant adjacent output ports and high space utilization. The structure comprises six output ports arranged hexagonally and one output port placed at the center of the hexagon in the same plane. To design such a divider considering the output ports' positions, this paper proposes the combination of a microstrip 6:1 unequal Wilkinson divider and a 6-way microstrip divider. To facilitate the implementation of the 6:1 unequal divider, including a transmission line with a high characteristic impedance, a microstrip coupler is used, and for the 6-way microstrip divider, a design scheme and analysis considering the impedance matching and isolation of the output ports are presented. Moreover, the ground layers of the two microstrip dividers are constructed in a back-to-back structure to minimize the size of the overall divider. For validation, a 5.8 GHz 7-way divider is designed, implemented, and measured. The measured S-parameters show that the proposed 7-way divider has appropriate return loss, insertion loss, isolation, and power distribution with a phase difference under 4.7°.