A New Method for Increasing Output Power of a Three-Cavity Transit-Time Oscillator

We propose a new method to increase the output power of a three-cavity transit-time oscillator (TC-TTO). Conventional transit-time effect oscillators, such as the split-cavity oscillator (SCO), super-Reltron, and TC-TTO (or double-foil SCO), etc., have a common feature that the span of any modulating cavity is uniform. The new method is to vary the three-cavity spans from uniform to nonuniform. Its configuration is called the nonuniform three-cavity transit-time oscillator (NTC-TTO). Numerical simulations show that the electron-beam is modulated more deeply in certain NTC-TTOs than that in the TC-TTO with the same whole modulating length, and the output microwave power in certain NTC-TTOs is higher than that in the TC-TTO. The experimental results are in agreement with those of the numerical simulations. The results show that the new method can increase the output power of a microwave tube based on the TC-TTO.