Gautam and I were talking about some modulation and demodulation and wondered what is the power combining situation for the triple resonant EOM installed 8 years ago. And we noticed that the current setup has additional ~5dB loss associated with the 3-to-1 power combiner. (Figure a)

N-to-1 broadband power combiners have an intrinsic loss of 10 log10(N). You can think about a reciprocal process (power splitting) (Figure b). The 2W input coming to the 2-port power splitter gives us two 1W outputs. The opposite process is power combining as shown in Figure c. This case, the two identical signals are the constructively added in the combiner, but the output is not 20Vpk but 14Vpk. Considering thge linearity, when one of the port is terminated, the output is going to be a half. So we expect 27dBm output for a 30dBm input (Figure d). This fact is frequently oversight particularly when one combines the signals at multiple frequencies (Figrue e). We can avoid this kind of loss by using a frequency-dependent power combiner like a diplexer or a triplexer.