Stub Matching
Stubs can be used to match a load impedance to the transmission line characteristic impedance. The stub is positioned a distance from the load. This distance is chosen so that at that point the resistive part of the load impedance is made equal to the resistive part of the characteristic impedance by impedance transformer action of the length of the main line. The length of the stub is chosen so that it exactly cancels the reactive part of the presented impedance. That is, the stub is made capacitive or inductive according to whether the main line is presenting an inductive or capacitive impedance respectively. This is not the same as the actual impedance of the load since the reactive part of the load impedance will be subject to impedance transformer action as well as the resistive part. Matching stubs can be made adjustable so that matching can be corrected on test.
A single stub will only achieve a perfect match at one specific frequency. For wideband matching several stubs may be used spaced along the main transmission line. The resulting structure is filter-like and filter design techniques are applied. For instance, the matching network may be designed as a Chebyshev filter but is optimised for impedance matching instead of passband transmission. The resulting transmission function of the network has a passband ripple like the Chebyshev filter, but the ripples never reach 0dB insertion loss at any point in the passband, as they would do for the standard filter.
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