SSETiC - SatCom Principles training

Mik Bartlett
50 and 75 Ohms
Quite often the 50/75 Ohm questions rears its head.

Digitally signed by Mik Bartlett DN: CN = Mik Bartlett, C = GB, O = SSETiC, OU = SSETiC.COM Reason: I am the author of this document Date: 2010.04.11 18:30:32 +01'00'

One first needs to understand why 50 Ohm and 75Ohm cable exist. Back in the 1930s, when coax cable was being developed it was discovered that 50 Ohms offers the best compromise between power handling and attenuation for an airspaced coaxial cable. At this time because receivers werent that developed signal levels were a lot higher than they are today and typically thousands of Watts (kWs) were being transmitted. There is a lot of complex math to support this and when you look at this it shows that 30 Ohms is best for power handling (less resistance = less heat = less noise etc) and 77 Ohms offers the lowest losses. The geometric mean is 48 Ohms, the arithmetic mean is 53.5 hence a 50 Ohm coaxial cable was born. For cheap CATV and domestic satellite cables 75 Ohm is the standard in principle because it offers the lowest loss. This is true for air-spaced coax but it transpires that solid dialectric, 50 Ohm, PTFE coax offers lower losses and better power handling. This was invented in 1983 by Roy Plunkett.

So why 75 Ohms ? This may be down to commercial reasoning rather than scientific as 75 Ohm cable uses a thinner centre conductor and so offers a lower cost to manufacture than 50 Ohm.
Ref: http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/why50ohms.cfm

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50 / 75 Ohm mismatch VSWR and Return Loss

There are a lot of questions raised with the 50 to 75 Ohm mismatch and there are some legitimate concerns and problems raised. There are two issues we as satcom engineers consider : (1) (2) Losses (Mismatch Loss) Phase errors on the PSK modulated carrier (Reflected power)

Below right is the circuit for a broadband 50 to 75 Ohm transformer. This device couples the input to the output and matches the impedance. To achieve this the device has a loss of 5.7dB

If we were to connect a 50 Ohm cable to a 75 Ohm device (for example an LNB with an F connector) then the loss is calculated by the following math.
Voltage reflection P = (50/75)/(50+75) = 0.2 Voltage transmission T = 1 - (0.2) = 0.96

In dB that means that, as a result of the mismatch, we lose 20log(0.96) = 0.35dB In the real world very few components are exactly 50 or 75 Ohms. Voltage Standing Wave Ratio or VSWR (vis-war) is the common way of expressing how close to a match the circuit is. VSWR is a measure of the amount of reflected power verses the propagated power. If we had a perfect 50 Ohm signal generator connected to a perfect 50 Ohm load via a perfect 50 Ohm coaxial cable then the VSWR would be 1:1 and no power would be reflected back. If the cable was open (ie someone just cut the connector off) then all the power would be reflected back towards the transmitter. This also would happen if the cable were shorted.
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A closely related parameter is the reflection coefficient. This term not only records the magnitude of the reflected wave but also its angle. Because the reflection coefficient measures magnitude of reflection and its angle it is VECTOR measurement. VSWR only measures magnitude and is therefore a SCALAR measurement. The VSWR can be calculated if the Reflection coefficient is known. Return loss (RL) is a measure of how much power is reflected from a load or termination. The closer the termination or load is to "ideal" characteristic impedance the lower the reflected power. It is expressed in dB referenced to the incident power and is usually negative indicating a lower power reflected than absorbed by load.

Mismatch Loss (ML) indicates how much power is lost when signal travels from one characteristic impedance to another. Since no system of connectors is perfect ML occurs at every connector, connection etc. Looking at the above we can see that if the Mismatch loss is 20log 0.2 (0.35dB) and the return loss is 13.98dB then the VSWR is 1.5:1 We really dont want 1.5:1 in our systems for 2 reasons (1) the losses and (2) the amount of reflected power which can disturb PSK modulated signals, especially those of the higher Modulation schema (ie 8PSK and 16APSK).
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The table below show the relationship between VSWR and the return loss. Note that as the VSWR improves so does the return loss ie less power is reflected.
VSWR :1 1.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 6.0 10.0 INFINITY Reflection coefficient 0.00 0.05 0.09 0.13 0.17 0.20 0.23 0.26 0.29 0.31 0.33 0.50 0.60 0.67 0.71 0.82 1.00 Return loss INFINITY -26.44 -20.83 -17.69 -15.56 -13.98 -12.74 -11.73 -10.88 -10.16 -9.54 -6.02 -4.44 -3.52 -2.92 -1.71 -0.00

Based on these figures, this data supports that a change in impedance to 50 ohm coax in the coax feed to the IF decoder that has an impedance of 75 ohms is minimal. However the return loss (amount of reflected power) is quite high (-14dBc) Its important to know that in the case where an IF decoder receives a signal that has been translated to a much lower frequency with a lot of gain "upfront" in the LNB block that the problem is minimised.

That gain does two things, (1) it sets the noise figure of the system at the LNB and (2) provides isolation to downstream reflections. The net effect is that even if some power is lost due to a mismatch we have plenty to spare from the high gain upfront. As for the reflected signal the high isolation of the LNB protects the system from being adversely affected. However in a transmit scenario the amount of reflected power can be an issue and the resultant standing/reflected wave can cause inter symbol interference (isi) within the phase modulated carrier before it reaches the amplifier so it is much more important to match the system and reduce the reflected signals in the TX path than the RX path ie before an amplifier. As we use higher modulation schema it is clear that we need to treat the incoming IF with greater respect. Adding a standing wave which is phase delayed to a PSK carrier only serves to confuse the demodulator at the other end of the link. One or two degrees of phase rotation isnt a huge problem to a QPSK modulated carrier but its a lot in terms of 16APSK. <http://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedia/vswr_visual.cfm>
Mik the Dish April 2010 Page |4
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