PM noise of a 40 GHz air-dielectric cavity oscillator

We describe the design of a low-phase-modulated (PM) noise, 40 GHz oscillator that uses a conventional air-dielectric cavity resonator as a frequency discriminator to improve the PM noise of a commercial 10 GHz dielectric resonator oscillator (DRO) frequency multiplied by four. The main features of this design incorporate (1) unloaded cavity quality factor (Q) of 30,000, (2) high coupling coefficient, (3) large carrier suppression by use of interferometric signal processing, (4) large operating signal power of approximately 1 watt (W), and (5) relatively small size. In addition, we report the PM noise of several Ka-band components.