A planar electromagnetic field stirrer with periodically arranged metal patterns and diode switches is proposed for improving uneven heating of a heated object placed in a microwave oven. The reflection phase of the proposed stirrer changes by switching the states of diodes mounted on the stirrer and the electromagnetic field in the microwave oven is stirred. The temperature distribution of a heated object located in a microwave oven was simulated and measured using the stirrer in order to evaluate the improving effect of the uneven heating. As the result, the heated parts of the objects were changed with the diode states and the improving effect of the uneven heating was experimentally indicated.

Since WLAN (wireless LAN) systems share the 2.4-GHz frequency band with microwave ovens, interference caused by radiated oven noise is a serious problem in practical WLAN application. To mitigate the oven noise interference in DS-SS (direct-sequence spread spectrum) WLAN systems, the use of adaptive filters is proposed. This method is based on the fact that oven noise behaves like CW (continuous wave) interference within a short duration. In contrast to previous reduction techniques for oven noise, this method can be implemented without changing any specifications of current WLAN systems. The results of numerical and experimental analyses clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of adaptive filters for improving the bit error rates of WLAN links subject to oven noise interference.

Electromagnetic noise radiated from microwave ovens may cause serious interference problems in wireless systems using the 2.4-GHz band. Since oven noise waveforms show strong dependence on the frequency selectivity of the receiver filters, the effect of band limitation on the interfering oven noise is an important issue for evaluating or comparing the performance degradation of wireless systems subject to interference. To understand these effects, theoretical and experimental investigations of the waveform, peak amplitude, and pulse width of band-limited oven noise are carried out. It is found that the peak amplitude of the received noise changes with the bandwidth in a way very similar to the case of a simple RF tone-burst input. The pulse width of the received noise also changes with the receiver bandwidth but takes a minimum value at a certain receiver bandwidth, which is an essential feature of band-limited microwave oven noise. In addition, an appropriate resolution bandwidth is determined for using a spectrum analyzer to obtain accurate oven noise parameters.

In this paper, the amplitude coefficient in each mode of leakage waves is calculated by using the amplitude level of the electric field about these unwanted waves under Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) definition for measuring the leakage waves irradiated from door portion at the time of microwave oven manufacture, and the percentage of each mode included in leakage waves is also calculated by using finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. Furthermore, shielding effectiveness (SE) of choke structure for suppressing the leakage waves is calculated using combined waves composed of higher order modes as each percentages. As a result, the percentage of each mode included in the leakage waves is examined quantitatively. The approximation analysis for the SE of the choke structure can also be carried out. Therefore, efficient method for evaluating the door structure of the oven at the time of manufacture has been established without the use of the memory in the calculation.

In this paper, we investigate the bit error rate (BER) performance of Direct Sequence-Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) systems under impulsive radio noise environments, and propose a novel DS-CDMA receiver which is designed to be robust against impulsive noise. At first, employing the Middleton's Class-A impulsive noise model as a typical model of impulsive radio noise, we discuss the statistical characteristics of impulsive radio noise and demonstrate that the quadrature components of impulsive noise are statistically dependent. Next, based on the computer simulation, we evaluate the BER performance of a conventional DS-CDMA system under a Class-A impulsive noise environment, and illustrate that the performance of the conventional DS-CDMA system is drastically degraded by the effects of the impulsive noise. To deal with this problem, motivated by the statistical dependence between the quadrature components of impulsive radio noise, we propose a new DS-CDMA receiver which can eliminate the effects of the channel impulsive noise. The numerical result shows that the performance of the DS-CDMA system under the impulsive noise environment is significantly improved by using this proposed receiver. Finally, to confirm the effectiveness of this proposed receiver against actual impulsive radio noise, we evaluate the BER performance of the DS-CDMA system employing the proposed receiver under a microwave oven (MWO) noise environment and discuss the robustness of the proposed receiver against MWO noise.

A new sealing structure for helical heater terminal used in a combination microwave oven is suggested, and its sealing characteristics are investigated. The new structure is simply a conductor tube coaxially covering the heater at the input terminal. With an optimally-designed structure of this type, the transmission coefficient of the heater can be reduced to -41.6 dB at 2450 MHz. When installed in a test set which is running with an output of 500 W at 2450 MHz, the microwave power leaking out from the heater terminal is found to be less than 0.2 mW/cm2.

Microwave oven interference much degrades the performance of digital radio communication systems, and, in order to obtain a good error performance under microwave oven interference environment, the digital radio communication systems should be newly designed for microwave oven interference environment. In this paper, using the Middleton's canonical class-A impulsive noise model, we propose a statistical model of microwave oven interference and discuss the performance improvement achieved by an optimum reception based on this statistical model. As the results, although the first order statistic of microwave oven interference can be modeled by class-A impulsive noise, because of the burst high level interference, the performance of optimum receiver designed for class-A noise cannot achieve a good error performance under microwave oven interference environment. In order to eliminate the effect of burst high level interference, we introduce sample interleave scheme and show that the performance of optimum receiver can be much improved by using sample interleave scheme.