Microwave Frequency Comb Generator for Radio Astronomy Applications

This paper describes a successful application of conventional RF synthesis techniques for the development of a low noise and high stability X-/Ka-band frequency comb generator which historically were forced to use bespoke designs to meet the performance requirements. We implement the multi-octave clustered high frequency comb by merging a low frequency comb generation technology with numerous parallel low-noise frequency synthesizers. The complexity of our system is substantially reduced by shifting to mass-market surface mount components.