A Better Balun? Done The Design of a 4:1 Wideband Balun Using a Parallel-Connected Transmission-Line Balun

This article presents a 4:1 wide-band balun that won the student design competition for wide-band baluns held during the 2016 IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) International Microwave Symposium (IMS2016) in San Francisco, California. For this contest, sponsored by Technical Committee MTT-17, participants were required to implement and evaluate their own baluns, with the winning entry achieving the widest bandwidth while satisfying the conditions of the competition rules during measurements at IMS2016. Some of the conditions were revised for this year's competition compared with previous competitions as follows.