The CFA as a modern radar element

The high efficiency and relatively low weight of CFA´s have made this class of tubes attractive to the radar system designer. However, because questions about their noise characteristics and phase coherence have remained unanswered there has been a hesitancy to specify their use in the more sophisticated system, now being planned. In order to obtain definitive data about these important properties, a continuous-cathode, forward-wave CFA which is operated with a cutoff electrode was examined carefully for intra-spectral noise and phase coherence. The tube tested provides 100 kw of peak power for 100 MHz at L-band with an average power rating of 3 kW.