Electronic – RC low pass filter difference with RC high pass filter

You should maximise purity of the signal fed to your amplifier to start, to make your job easier.

Depending on your output turned circuit and amplifier device topology you may have to deal with 2nd harmonic on upor 3rd on up. This is very standard fare at this sort of power level and you should have no trouble [tm] implementing a single filter.

The output matching stage of an RF amplifier is usually also a low pass filter by design, whether a traditional pi coupler (C-L-C) or LC circuit or other, or strip line or resonator functional equivalent. As you are usually concerned with harmonics (2x, 3x etc the desired fundamental) the requirements are usually not severe.

You'll find relatively few RF output stages with complex explicit low pass filtering.

Around 500 MHz is a bit of an in-between range where lumped element (RC) or waveguide / resonant trough etc type tuning is appropriate.

A good start is to look at Amateur Radio amplifiers that work around that frequency and see what sort of output tanks they use. Common amateur bands of relevance are at 432 MHz (70 cm) and 1296 MHz (23 cm). There is also the "2 metre" Ham band at about 144 MHz but that will be leaning more towards lumped element tanks and filters.

In 1990 Motorola published application note AR347 A compact 1 kW 2-50 MHz solid-state linear amplifier. While this is below your frequency range of interest, this amplifier has become a workhorse starting point for a zillion spinoffs and much can be learned by looking up examples.

432 MHz 110 Watt cct

Amateur amplifier designs up to 1 kiloWatt are common enough so something that works at 432 MHz and 1 kW should be scaleable to your use in the 500-600 MHz range.

Here's a page with Many amateur RF amplfier designs - some very close to your application.

This 432 MHz PA useuses steam power aka a power triode but shows you how simple a design is deeemed acceptable. Plumbing skills will be handy. An antenna tuner may follow this stage - but reading a number of amateur design articles will rapidly introduce you to the subject.

Steam power design from here:

Nice 432 MHz 1500 Watt amplifier pictures only here but you can follow it up if it looks useful

Design using older tech Russian made vacuum tube but useful for its output stage comments article here

They note:

• The output circuit: The output uses a λ/2 75 Ohm stripline with both tuning and loading at the open end, it is constructed with silvered cooper 1mm thick with 125mm width and 220mm overall length. The line has a 25mm collar to reduce the spacing to ground while the finger stock contacts the tube anode on the lower cooper ring of the anode cooler. The line is fixed at 45mm from ground by ceramic or Teflon insulators (Teflon insulators are recommended). The output on a 7/16 connector (or a good quality N connector) is connected directly to the loading flapper. This flapper is 15mm by 30mm at a distance from 10 to 30mm from the end of the line. A choque connects the output to ground to avoid the presence of high voltage in the case of a flash over at the output flapper. The movable tuning flapper "C1" is 76mm wide by 45mm high, and tunes at 432MHz aprox. at 16mm distance from the line. The fixed flapper "C2" is 76mm wide by 35mm high, and is about 15mm from the inner side of the end of the plate line. The use of a kapton sheet between the flappers and the stripline has eliminated arcing from the flappers to the stripline

One kW at 432 mHz useful discussion and pictures

Many RF amplifier links

The cap near the power pin is not to protect the part from noise, but to keep the part from generating noise as the logic switching causes rapid changes in supply current. Ideally the cap would supply instantaneous demands for more current without increasing current all the way back to the power source.

The sum of the impedances on the PSU side of the circuit - the internal impedance of the PSU plus the inductance, resistance, and capacitance of the traces or planes - is enough to give some low pass filtering on the input side of the cap. I think of the cap as a tiny a power supply that can respond to demands with a bandwidth in the multi-MHz range. The larger regulators that supply a full circuit react far too slowly and the cap is a temporary source of power that replaces or bypasses (or decouples) the PSU. Placing the cap close to the power pin on a chip minimizes resistance and inductance that would slow the response.

CMOS parts consume most of their power while switching state. For microprocessors this means on clock edges and the current draw is in little fast spikes. The size of the spikes varies as fast as the clock as every instruction uses different combinations of internal circuits. Imagine the circuitry used in checking a register for zero versus fetching data from RAM. The power needed fluctuates at the clock rate. The greater the current changes, the bigger the cap. Calculating the right size is a matter of estimating for most of us and the 0.1uF ceramic cap is so common that it is very low cost. Capacitor construction is also a concern as well as change with temperature. Some can respond quicker than others and some vary by 80% over the commercial temperature range.

They are also called bypass caps because: 1) They can "bypass" (short) high frequency PSU noise to ground. 2) They can "bypass" the PSU and respond to high frequency demands for power.

Also called "decoupling caps", a more accurate term for high frequencies as they "decouple" the power demand between the part and the PSU.