A Comprehensive Guide to the 2-Way Power Divider

When it comes to microwave and radiofrequency (MW and RF, respectively) technology, one of the driving forces behind them is power. That is, without the necessary power to transmit and receive signals, communications in these fields would not occur. That said, the distribution of power to where it’s needed is one of building blocks of MW and RF communications.

To this extent, power dividers will usually come into play, since they’re used to split or distribute, and then transport power to more than one place – usually, one or more machines. The 2-way power divider is one such component. You can tell from the name that it’s designed to divide and transmit power to two devices, say, in a system.

Basic Applications of a 2-Way Power Divider

Theoretically, this passive device will have three ports – one is the input port, and the other two are the output ports, with all ports matching and completely isolated from one another.

Usually, a power divider will provide 50Ω (ohm) resistance each of its 3 ports. Due to this, it is used in system testing so as to enable comparison measurements for any reason. It can also be used to measure two characteristics of a signal at the same time – for instance, power compared to frequency.

Other applications include measuring diversity gain, or the increase in the ratio of signal to interference when two or more channels of communication are used to strengthen signals. The power divider is bi-directional as well, meaning it can act as a power combiner.

Types of Power Dividers

In order to accommodate all possible applications, different dividers are engineered to handle different frequencies. As such, they can be classed as resistive, octave, and multi-octave.

Octave power dividers, as the name implies, split the input they receive up to 8 ways – even if some can be used for less than that. A clear advantage here is that the insertion loss is relatively inconsequential, even when one or more of the output ports isn’t being used.

Multi-octave power dividers, on the other hand, are usually available in 2-way up to 8-way configurations when it comes to their output ports. They usually are built to operate in the 500 MHz (megahertz) to 2.7 GHz (gigahertz) range, and can work with WiFi bands, 3G, and 4G. This makes it the best choice for test environments and distributed antenna systems (DAS).

Then there are resistive power dividers, which are naturally wideband power dividers and can be used in most applications necessitating wideband functionality. They can work in DC or zero frequency all the way up to 18 GHz. Because such components usually contain only lumped elements, they can be made extremely compact, therefore saving space.

However, a resistive power divider suffers from resistive loss of a little over 3 dB (decibels), not to mention poor isolation. Therefore, if high isolation or minimal loss is needed for the application, a resistive power divider wouldn’t be the best choice.

Regardless of application needs, commercial or military, you’ll definitely benefit from consulting with experts at companies like AWG Tech, especially if you’re not sure how to choose the components. Or you can have a 2-way power divider custom engineered, for instance, if you don’t find what you’re looking for among off-the-shelf models.