FREE-SPACE RF TRIGGERING OF AN ACTIVE ANTENNA WITH SERIES-CONNECTED TUNNELING DIODES

Connecting several tunneling diodes-resonant tunneling diodes (RTD's) or tunnel diodes-in series has been shown to be a feasible method fur increasing the output power and stability of oscillator circuits using these devices, However, such oscillators require special means of tri ggering due to biasing difficulties associated with their dc instabili ty. RF triggering was proven to be an effective method of initiating s uch an oscillation in one-port circuits, An experimental demonstration of free-space RF triggering of an active antenna with a series connec tion is described here, Active antenna circuits offer excellent isolat ion between the triggering and oscillation signals and a favorable con figuration for spatial power-combining arrays.