🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr11.194650.18694@willamette.edu>, agulhati@willamette.edu
(Ashish Gulhati) says:
>
>Excuse MY ignorance too, but what's a magnetron (I do know what a MASER is
>supposed to be)?
>
>Ashish

From my consulting with Litton Industries (many moons ago) a magnetron
fires electrons from a negative voltage source towards a "spin chamber"
which has a magnetic field set up by a permanant magnet. When an electron
enters the field, it starts to spin (thus the name of that chamber).
There is a small slot (or a number of slots depending on the application)
that couple into the side of the spin chamber which let out an electric
field (negative electrons passing hole in grounded "maggie" cause a
varing waveform (frequency) that transfers energy out) into a waveguide.
The frequency can be varied (when the tube is first turned on) by changing
the physical size of the spin chamber with a "tuning slug" . The larger
the volume, the lower the frequency.

Related tubes in this family are the Klystron (no permanant magnets, just
a big electromagnet to spin the electrons) which can be modulated,
and the Traveling Wave Tube (TWT) which is actually an amplifier, but
uses similar physics to maggie and klyde.