Experimental Studies of the Omnitron Electrical Components

A prototype resonator has been built and is under study. It tunes from 6.8 to 33 MHz and is designed to produce an accelerating gap voltage of 60 kV at 20 Mc. Sixty 30-in. -diam by 1/2-in.-thick ferrite discs are used. The resonator is excited by a final amplifier using an RCA 4616 tube designed to deliver a peak RF power of 300 kW. The paper also discusses studies of the RF drive train and the master oscillator, which tunes continuously from 1.5 to 33 MHz. It is a beat-frequency oscillator using a crystal-controlled fixed oscillator and a varactor-tuned variable oscillator. A ferrite magnet system, also under study, contains a coaxial, lumped-constant pulse line with a hydrogen thyratron switch tube coupled to a ferrite magnet. The pulse line uses ceramic capacitors and operates at one atmosphere of SF6. The rise time is 100 ns, the pulse width 5 Lsec, and the repetition rate 60 pps. Peak instantaneous power during the pulse is 200 MW; average power is 65 kW.