Introduction

Because of the high power emitted from a radar transmitter, there is a greater potential for failure in this unit than in any other. The radar technician will probably do more repair work on the transmitter, than on all the other units in the system, and a sound foundation knowledge of the transmitter will pay big dividends in system restoration and outage prevention.

The size of this chapter substantially exceeded preliminary planning. Even so, it is limited from what it might have been; the target size of the entire book played a part in this decision.

The fundamentals of common radar-transmitter hardware were addressed in preceding chapters. This chapter will deal in greater detail with several aspects of the pulsed radar transmitter. One topic will be the origin and composition of the emitted energy, a wide spectrum of frequencies. Another subject is the modulator, which will apply a high-Voltage pulse to a third area of interest, the final power amplifier, which may be a magnetron, a klystron power amplifier tube, a traveling-wave-tube (twt), or an amplitron, also called a cross-field amplifier (cfa). There are still other means to transmit the radar burst. A major component in the modulator is the pulse-forming network, an artificial transmission line; considerable discussion of this device will be contained in this chapter.