Product Design Spotlight – Arrestors: RF Performance

As one of NexTek’s primary product lines, our range of Coaxial Surge Protectors is designed to cover a wide range of potential application requirements with high-performance designs that use high-quality construction and materials.  One especially important technical aspect of coaxial arrestor design is a given unit’s RF Performance.

Example RF Performance Curve of a Wideband Quarter Wavelength Stub Arrestor – VSWR is shown on the upper graph, while Insertion Loss (dB) is shown on the lower graph.

Why is RF Performance important?: The primary purpose of any surge arrestor is to protect against unwanted damage from Lightning or other sources of transient energy (like Static [ESD], HIRF, or EMP.) However, during >99.9% of any given arrestor’s lifetime the only goal is to avoid interference with normal system operation… In the case of coaxial surge protection, this means conducting RF signals on the cable’s thru-path with a minimum of loss or performance degradation.

How do NexTek Solutions Differ?: Over NexTek’s nearly 30 Years of experience designing surge protectors, we have built up a knowledge base that allows us to design arrestors with exceptional thru-performance while also ensuring that there is no trade-off in Surge Response or Surge Handling performance. The low-loss wideband characteristics of some of the QSS/QWS family of arrestors is one good example of how NexTek arrestor designs are at the cutting edge of what is available in the marketplace worldwide.

Additional Factors: Not only are the fundamental arrestor designs advanced, but the attention to quality during assembly and pre-delivery testing is also second-to-none. NexTek arrestors are 100% RF Tested during assembly, so that you can have confidence that the product will be ready-to-go as soon as you receive them!

Learn More:

Coaxial Surge Arrestors (link)

Articles:

Coaxial Surge Protection of High Frequency Lines (.PDF)

Selecting Coaxial Surge Protectors (.PDF)