An overview of my efforts to bridge the gap in the microwave tube area between what universities provide and what the industry needs

Abstract

My efforts to “bridge the gap” span a period of nearly 40 years and consist of over 100 courses on microwave tubes presented to well over 2000 scientists, engineers, and technicians. I developed the first five-day course for the US Navy. After several more courses, I wrote Microwave Tubes. In 1988, I developed the equivalent of a one-semester course on traveling wave tubes for the Navy and presented it several times each at Teledyne, Litton, Varian, and Hughes. In 1994, I wrote Principles of Traveling Wave Tubes, which was translated and published in Russia. I continued expanding and refining the courses and, in 2011, I wrote Klystrons, Traveling Wave Tubes, Magnetrons, Crossed-Field Amplifiers, and Gyrotrons, which was translated and published in China. Most recently, my courses have been attended by scientists and engineers from China, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Germany as well as the United States.

Keywords:

• Microwave tubes
• short course
• traveling wave tube
• klystron
• magnetron
• crossed-field amplifier
• gyrotron

Acknowledgments

First of all, the encouragement and support by Tom Bekker, Joe Dutkowsky and Brian Mitsdarffer, who were all civilian employees of the US Navy, were instrumental in my development of courses on microwave tubes. Dr Armond Staprans from CPI provided his portion of an unpublished book for me to use. Dr George Farney from Varian gave me a manual on microwave tubes that he had prepared for the Air Force as well as unpublished material on crossed-field devices. He also sent me a carton of CFAs (crossed-field amplifiers) and magnetrons to use as “show and tell” items when explaining the operation of crossed-field devices. Dr Richard True from L-3 Communications provided a great deal of unpublished as well as published material. Professor Marvin Chodorow from Stanford University made recordings of his lectures available to me. Professor Richard Grow from the University of Utah provided a copy of his lecture notes for my use. Dr Henry Kosmahl and Dr Jim Dayton from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) provided extensive material on depressed collectors. Dr Kurt Amboss from Hughes EDD provided extensive lecture material from internal courses at Hughes. In addition to these major contributions, there have been valuable inputs from Neil Wilson of the Army ETDL (Electronics Technology Development Laboratory), David Zavidil of Northrop and Teledyne, Gordon Lange of Hughes EDD, Frank Welker and Bobby Gray of RADC (Rome Air Development Center) and from hundreds of course attendees. There were also negative inputs such as the question by a young second lieutenant who, at the end of the first day of a course for the Air Force, sheepishly approached me and asked “What’s a microwave?” Clearly, I was not getting through to him. I found out later that he was a misguided business major with no technical background. He was told by his supervisor that they were spending too much money on microwave tubes and that he should go and find out what the tubes were used for. Acknowledgments would not be complete without saying “thank you” to my wife for her patience, support and encouragement while I was preparing text and presentation materials.