High-temperature superconducting (HTS) films have low surface resistance in the microwave region. This indicates that HTS passive microwave devices, for example, filters and antennas, are promising for commercial use. For superconducting filters, low insertion loss, sharp skirt property and high attenuation value out of band are important, and for superconducting antennas, electrically small antennas and super-directive high-gain antennas are useful. It is known that the elliptic filter has a sharp skirt property compared with that of a Chebyshev filter. We examined a cross-coupled filter which is one type of elliptic filter. The insertion loss of the filter was approximately 0.3 dB. The skirt property of the four-resonator cross-coupled filter was almost equal to that of an eight-resonator hairpin filter. We also examined a cryocooler cooling system for superconducting antenna and measured the relative gain, directivity and power capability of an HTS antenna. The gain of the HTS patch antenna was approximately 10 dB larger than that of a normal conducting antenna. The large gain of the HTS antenna was caused by the low surface impedance and enhancement effect of the dielectric window of the cooling system.

The high-Tc superconducting active antenna proposed here for millimeter and submillimeter radiowave communications, uses a YBCO slot antenna with a series Josephson junction array to increase the normal-state resistance of the junctions, in order to ensure impedance matching between the antenna and the junctions. The antenna is a coplanar waveguide fed slot antenna, which can be easily and monolithically combined with the Josephson junctions. The design frequency of the antenna is 10 GHz and the obtained bandwidth of a VSWR less than 2 was 4.1%. Normal-state resistance values of the junction array could be confirmed by measuring I-V characteristics and 100-MHz impedance measurements, and both agree very well. Microwave mixing experiments were carried out using the junction array with the antenna, and the experiments showed that the conversion gain of the junction was proportional to the number of the junctions. The conversion gain of an eight-junction mixer with the antenna was found to be -6 dB.