Design and performance evaluation of small, two- and four-stage depressed collectors for a 4.8 to 9.6 GHz high-performance traveling wave tube

A program to improve the efficiency of traveling wave tubes (TWT's) for use in electronic countermeasure (ECM) systems by applying multistage depressed collector (MDC) and spent beam refocusing techniques is studied. Three dimensional electron trajectories are computed through-out the slow wave structure of the TWT, the spent beam refocuser, and the depressed collector. Both TWT and MDC performances are analytically evaluated.