New developments in gridded coupled cavity millimeter-wave TWTs

Two new PPM focused millimeter-wave coupled cavity TWTs have been made at Hughes: a 100 Watt aperture gridded 50 percent duty liquid cooled tube that operates at 94 GHz with a 2 GHz bandwidth and a 4000 Watt shadow gridded 5.6 percent duty air cooled tube that operates at 35 GHz with a 3 GHz bandwidth. In the pursuit of lower cost millimeter-wave TWTs and higher production rates, manufacturing technology programs are in work at Hughes. These techniques consist of computer controlled precision machining of standard re-entrant cavities and fine blanking of ferrule-less cavities.