11/25/2019 Chain Home and the cavity magnetron

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Chain Home and the History

Cavity Magnetron Marion's pages

A magnetron is a diode that can be made to oscillate.

This sounds impossible. A diode is a simple component with a

single function - it lets current flow though it in one direction,
but not in the other. But an oscillator is a complicated electronic
circuit carefully designed to supply energy at a single frequency.
An oscillating diode seems as unlikely as an oven that doesn't
get hot, yet both are quite common. There's a magnetron inside
every microwave oven, oscillating efficiently at ultra-high
frequency and emi ing nearly a kilowa of energy that bounces
around inside the oven and heats up the food.

A cavity magnetron like the one shown on the left played a

crucial role in radar systems in the early 1940s. It's small enough
to fit in your pocket - the black metal disk is only 3" (7.5 cm) in
diameter. The magnetron in your kitchen microwave oven was
designed 60 years later, and looks nothing like this!

But before I describe how the device works, I need to explain

why it was important, and that involves a brief look at the UK's
wartime Chain Home radar defence system and how it came to
be built.

In the early 1930s there was no such thing as radar, and it was
generally agreed that "the bomber would always get through".
There was some wild talk about Death Rays though, and so the
Director of Scientific Research (DSR) for the Air Ministry asked
the Superintendent of the Radio Research Department of the
National Physical Laboratory at Slough to let him know if such a
gadget could be built. The Superintendent - Robert Watson Wa
- asked A.F. Wilkins, one of his Scientific Ofiicers, to do the
sums. Wilkins duly reported that, if an aircraft could be
irradiated from 600m for 10 minutes at a power level of 5,000
megawa s, the pilot's brain would indeed begin to boil.

Watson Wa thought that this power level was too low (not that
it would have been remotely possible to achieve it) because the
aircraft's metal skin would probably stop most of the energy
from ge ing through. On the other hand, if the metal skin
reflected some energy, it might just be possible to detect the
reflections, and he did a few sums of his own to find out. It
looked as though the idea should work. But the DSR's boss - Air
Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding - didn't trust scientists, or their
calculations, and demanded a proper test with a real aeroplane.

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Detection of aircraft using radio

The Daventry So on a freezing cold day in
experiment
was where it all February 1935, Wilkins set
began. off in a van from Slough,
heading for Daventry. His
mission was to demonstrate
that it really was possible to
detect an aircraft flying
close to the big BBC
transmi er there. Daventry
was chosen because Wilkins had already measured the radiation
pa ern of its aerial and could make an educated guess about
where the experiment was likely to give positive results.
CRT = Cathode The idea was to erect a couple of aerials 100 feet apart in a field
ray tube - an
five miles from the transmi er and connect them to a dual-
oscilloscope
screen channel receiver. Both receiver outputs would be connected to a
CRT. By carefully adjusting the phase of one receiver input
relative to the other, it should be possible to null out the ground
wave, leaving a motionless spot in the centre of the CRT. But an
aircraft moving nearby should reflect different levels of signal to
each receiver, which should cause the spot to move.

Wilkins and his driver, Dyer, put up the aerials, and went off to
find a hotel for the night. They returned after dinner to set up
the receiver. It was dark by then, and there was no light in the
van, so Dyer patiently struck match after match. Wilkins worked
as quickly as he could, and shortly after midnight the system
seemed to be functioning. They disconnected the aerials and got
back in the van. It wouldn't move - it was frozen to the ground.
Fortunately, they had a spade in the back and could dig
themselves out. After a few hours sleep, they were back on site
well before Mr. Watson Wa and the man from the Air Ministry
arrived in the morning, and everything still worked.

It had been arranged

The Handley-
Page Heyford with the RAF that a
was in RAF Heyford bomber would
service from
1933-39 and
fly over the BBC masts
could carry a towards the van.
3,500lb bomb Unfortunately, the pilot
for 900 miles
flew east instead of south-east, and although the observers on
the ground could hear the aircraft, the spot on the CRT didn't
move. Subsequent passes were more successful, though, and
when the bomber flew nearly overhead, the spot grew into a
line. The idea clearly worked. It really was possible to detect the
tiny amounts of radio energy reflected from an aircraft.

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The idea of radar

Using radio to detect that there was an aircraft out there
somewhere was interesting, but not very useful. How could you
work out where it was? And its altitude? And which way it was
going? And whether it was alone in the sky? These questions
needed answers before anyone could think about designing a
system to exploit the idea.

Watson Wa already knew that it was possible to transmit

pulses of energy and see their echoes (from the ionosphere) on a
CRT connected to a sensitive receiver. Given a sufficiently
powerful pulse, and a sufficiently sensitive receiver, he thought
it should be possible to see aircraft as far away as 50 miles. Their
altitude could be assessed by comparing the signals from
receiving aerials mounted at different heights, and their bearing
found from the relative signal strengths seen by several widely
separated receiving stations.

Much experimental work needed to be done, and a suitable site

was found at Orfordness, off the Suffolk coast. The radio
industry knew how to make equipment that worked well at 6
MHz - the state of the art, at that time - so with a suitable aerial
hung from a couple of 60 foot towers and the original pulse
transmi er transported from Slough, Watson Wa and his small
team began to explore how a workable radar system might be
built.
Speed of light The pulse length was shortened from 200 µS to 30 µS in order to
=
reduce the minimum range at which reflections could be seen on
300m / μS, so
a 200μS pulse the CRT, and the frequency was raised from 6 MHz to 11 MHz
is 60 km long. when this was found to decrease the receiver noise level. By July
of 1935 the equipment was detecting aircraft 50 miles away.

Orfordness had proved that radar could be made to work, and

now the team needed to grow. More space was required - for
laboratories, bigger and be er aerials, and above all, for more
people. A be er site was quickly identified at Bawdsey Manor,
ten miles down the coast, and development was transferred
there in 1936.

Early in 1937 specifications were being wri en - the transmi er

must deliver at least 200 kW of pulse power, and 50 µV at the
receiver input must produce a trace deflection of at least 1" -
whilst work had already begun on constructing the first five CH
sites. By the outbreak of war in September 1939 there were 19
operational CH stations, together with the plo ing rooms and
other infrastructure that put the information they collected into
the hands of those who needed it.

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Chain Home

A photograph of a Chain Home station shows a few big towers

in a field, but gives no clue as to what the towers were for. In
fact, there were two sets of towers - one for transmi ing, and the
other for receiving.

The two tall transmi er towers (on the left) supported a curtain
of end-fed horizontal dipoles, as shown in the diagram below.

Transmitting

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The station was designed to transmit on one of four possible

frequencies (to counter expected jamming a acks by the enemy),
so three transmi er towers were needed for the four sets of
dipoles.

... frequency From the length of the half-wave dipole it's straightforward to
(MHz)
work out what frequency was used. Since half a wavelength was
= 300 /
wavelength (m) 18 feet (5.5m), a wavelength was 11m, which corresponds to a
frequency of 27 MHz. In fact, most sources say that the
frequency was 20-30 MHz. Today's mobile phones use
frequencies a hundred times higher than this, but in the late
1930s it was not a simple ma er to generate 250 kW at 30 MHz,
nor to design a suitable receiver.

CH = The task facing the designer of an aerial system is to arrange the

Chain Home
structure so that as much as possible of the radiated energy goes
in the right direction. A simple horizontal dipole by itself won't
do - it radiates in all directions (except along its axis). The CH
transmi er aerial array included a curtain of reflectors hung on
the landward side to redirect this energy outwards, across the
sea, to where it was useful.

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The main problem in

controlling the azimuth
of the radiation (that is,
the angle from the
horizontal) is that the
ground acts as a mirror,
so it's practically
impossible to send the
energy out horizontally. The best solution is to keep the ground
as far away as possible.

But some energy is always reflected from the ground, and

unfortunately the reflection process adds 180 degrees of phase
shift. This means that at some angle the reflected signal and the
direct signal will cancel each other out. There is always an angle
at which NO energy is transmi ed.

The performance of an
aerial is usually
illustrated by means of
its polar diagram,
which shows how
much energy (in
relative terms) is
radiated in each direction. The performance of the CH
transmi er aerials looked something like the diagram on the
right, with a null at about 5 degrees above the horizontal. With
almost no energy being transmi ed at 5 degrees, the system was
effectively blind in this direction.

The blind spot was removed by adding a supplementary array,

known as the gap filler, suspended underneath the main array.
Its polar diagram was designed to radiate maximum energy at 5
degrees.

At 360 feet tall, the Chain Home transmi er towers were huge -
just about the same height as St. Paul's Cathedral. This allowed
their aerials to illuminate aircraft flying at 1,000 feet when they
were still 40 miles away (and if the enemy aircraft were
considerate enough to fly at 15,000 feet, they could be seen 150
miles away). But the transmi er array acted as a floodlight - it
broadcast energy out to sea over a wide angle. This meant that a
station had to be built every 20 miles or so along the coast, to
give continuous overlapping coverage.

It also meant that the receiving antennas had to be quite

sophisticated. A simple dipole antenna would detect the echo
returning from an aircraft, but would give no sense of
whereabouts the aircraft was.
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Receiving

The receiving antenna

towers were smaller
and lighter. They
were 240 feet high,
and built of wood. In
Echoes of war Sir
Bernard Lovell
explains that the
receiving aerials
consisted of two pairs
of crossed dipoles at
different heights. The aerials were used in pairs, as shown here,
to determine both the bearing of the target aircraft and its
height.

By comparing the relative strengths of the signals received by

each of the crossed dipoles, using a goniometer - a sort of
adjustable phase shifter - and finding a null point, it was
possible to deduce the target's bearing. Then by comparing the
relative outputs of the pairs of aerials at different heights (and
correcting for the curvature of the earth) the height of the target
could also be found.

It was time-consuming work, and needed concentration.

Women turned out to be much be er at it than men.
More information can
be found at
Effectiveness
http://www. Chain Home was
radarpages
.co.uk/ built to give early
mob/ch/chainhome.htm warning of where
bomber raids were
coming from, and
when, so that fighter
squadrons could be
scrambled to
intercept them instead of simply patrolling in the hope of
spo ing the enemy. More effective use of fighters meant that
fewer would be needed, and Government was acutely aware
that there might not be enough.

The Ba le of Britain was fought largely in daylight. Provided the

fighters could be sent to the same area of sky as the bombers,
they could see the enemy and engage. If the German High
Command had understood the importance of Chain Home and
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seriously damaged it before concentrating its a ack on the cities,

things may have turned out very differently. As it was, German
tactics switched from daylight raids to night bombing, where
cities were still relatively easy to find, but bombers were not.
The radar stations could still track the bombers, but the fighters
sent to meet them could not see where they were.

Weaknesses
The CH system had two major weaknesses. It couldn't see low-
flying aircraft until they were very close, and it was so huge and
heavy that it couldn't be fi ed to ships, let alone aircraft. Both
these problems were a direct result of the choice of operating
frequency.
CD = Technology advanced quickly, and by 1939 a system developed
Coast Defence
by the Army CD group could deliver 25 kW pulses at 300 MHz
CHL = (that is, at a wavelength of just 1.5m instead of CH's 11m.) A
Chain home shorter wavelength meant a smaller and lighter aerial, which
Low
permi ed more beam-shaping elements, which gave a narrower
beam. On trial in July 1939 the system proved able to see aircraft
flying at 500 feet 25 miles away. Watson Wa was impressed,
and the Air Ministry ordered 24 copies of the equipment, which
became known as Chain Home Low, to plug gaps in the radar
coverage around the coast.

It also proved possible to

fit a variant of the 300
MHz system into an
aircraft. In 1939 a Fairy
Ba le was fi ed with
quarter-wave horizontal antennas on either side of the engine,
and half-wave dipoles above and below the wing. The radar
operator sat behind the pilot and directed him to the target via
the intercom. Air Marshal Dowding was taken on a
demonstration flight, and the system was shown to work. But its
range was limited, and the unwanted reflections from the
ground were a problem.

The way forward seemed to lie in shorter and shorter

wavelengths - microwaves, in other words. The problem was
that nobody in the world knew how to generate large amounts
of power at microwave frequencies.

Early magnetrons

Magnetrons had been used as high-frequency oscillators in

university physics laboratories since the early 1920s. This
illustration is from Terman's Radio engineering (1937), and he
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says that magnetrons had been

made to oscillate at frequencies
as high as 30 GHz (that is, with
a 1 cm wavelength), though
even at lower frequencies their
efficiency was a miserable 5 to
10%.

The device was relatively

simple - a central cathode, with
a split anode around it, and a
magnetic field arranged to be
in line with the cathode.

Terman
helpfully
includes a
diagram
showing
how to
make the
valve oscillate. I suspect that the tuned circuit was usually a
Lecher line - two short parallel lengths of metal with an
adjustable bridging strap to change the frequency.

It's not obvious quite how this simple diode could be made to
oscillate. But think about what's actually happening to the
electrons in the space between the cathode and the anode.
Fleming's The cathode is heated, which causes it to give off great clouds of
left-hand rule
lets you work
electrons. They start to accelerate towards the positive anode,
out which and in a normal diode valve they would smash into it at high
direction a speed like bugs into a windscreen. But the magnetron also
current-
carrying includes a magnet (the clue's in the name, really) and electrons
conductor will moving in a magnetic field do not travel in straight lines.
move when
exposed to an
external The left-hand rule shows
magnetic field. what happens when a
The mnemonics
seem clumsy, current flows in a magnetic
but that's how I field. The electrons are
learned it at pushed in a direction at
school.
Incidentally, right angles both to their
Fleming also original direction and to the
invented the
applied field. The diagram
diode valve.
illustrates that the thumb
and fingers are all at right angles to each other, like the corner of
a box.

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The magnetic field is trying to make the electrons travel in a

circle around the cathode, whilst the electric field (between
cathode and anode) is trying to make them move directly
outwards towards the anode. The electrons are influenced by
both fields, and are forced to take a curved path.

The actual path the electrons follow depends (of course) on the
relative strengths of the magnetic and electric fields.
In a In a weak magnetic field (A & B), the path hardly deviates from
magnetron, an
a straight line. If the magnetic field is very strong (D), the
INCREASE in
the magnetic electrons come zooming back to the cathode (and when they hit
field (between it, they liberate more electrons, which can quickly destroy the
points C and D
on the graph) cathode!)
causes a
DECREASE in But if the magnetic field has the right strength (C) the electrons
the anode just graze the anode. A few stick to it, but many don't.
current.
The end result is that a cloud of fast-moving electrons circulates
in the space between the cathode and the anode.

Resonant cavities
Most oscillators are built around a tuned circuit - that is, a
capacitor connected to an inductor. The capacitor has two
parallel plates, allowing an electric field (that stores energy) to
exist between them. The inductor is a coil of wire, allowing a
magnetic field (that also stores energy) to exist inside it.
Connecting C and L together lets energy flow between them.
The values of C and L determine the resonant frequency of the
tuned circuit.

Suppose the capacitor acquires a lump of energy from

somewhere, so that it has somehow magically become charged.
An electric field springs into existence between its plates. The
plates are connected together by the inductor, so the electric
field immediately begins to collapse, driving a current through
the inductor. This current builds up a magnetic field inside the
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coil. Eventually, when the capacitor is fully discharged, the

current stops. The magnetic field now has nothing to sustain it,
and so it in turn begins to collapse. The energy it had stored
reappears as a current flowing back into the capacitor,
recharging it (but this time with the opposite polarity) and again
establishing an electric field. When the magnetic field has
dwindled to nothing, the current stops, and now all the energy
is again stored in the capacitor's electric field. Energy is
swapped back and forth between capacitor and inductor, like
the water in a bathtub sloshing backwards and forwards from
one end to the other. The smaller C and L are, the more quickly
the energy sloshes to and fro.

The cavities in
the magnetron
in your The coil need not have lots of turns - one turn will do. And the
microwave
oven probably
single turn could take the form of a cylinder. And the whole
look like this. tuned circuit (for that's what it is) could be milled out of a block
Almost any of solid copper, if that turned out to be convenient.
shape will do,
and some are
The first cavity magnetron was made in just this way.
cheaper to
make than
others.
Some energy is lost when current flows through resistance, of
course, so the active device driving the tuned circuit must
regularly top up the energy level in the circuit. One way of
looking at this is to think of the active device as a negative
resistor of just the right value to cancel out the positive
resistance in the circuit. Positive (that is, normal) resistance
absorbs energy from the circuit. Negative resistance contributes
energy to the circuit.

In a cavity magnetron, the energy losses are made up by energy

taken from the circulating stream of electrons, and in rather a
clever way.

The cavity magnetron

It's really small!
The actual anode
block is 7.5cm across
and less than 4cm
deep.
Peak ratings: 13 kV,
10A, 40kw output at
3.3 GHz (9.1cm)
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Photographs of a
CV64 can also be
seen here:
http://www.r-
type.org/exhib/aaa0940.htm

This photograph of a cavity magnetron shows what it looks like

with the lid removed. It doesn't show that it must be placed
within the jaws of a huge magnet in order to work. Like its glass
predecessor, this magnetron consists of a central cathode,
surrounded by an anode, sealed in a vacuum, and with an
external magnetic field arranged to be in line with the cathode.
Randall and But this device includes a brilliant and simple innovation.
Boot made an
engineer's
Instead of spli ing the anode and connecting it to an external
wheel, tuned circuit, the inventors (Randall and Boot, at Birmingham
And they University) used lots of identical resonant-cavity tuned circuits
carved it from
copper, not and put them inside the anode. This allows the circulating
from steel. electron cloud to interact directly with the tuned circuits.
They drilled it,
and sliced it,
and when they
How a magnetron works
were done, Suppose the magnetron is just starting up. Electrons begin to
They'd made a
metal circulate around the cathode, going faster and faster. They travel
magnetrun! at random speeds as the system sorts itself out and tries to se le
into a stable state.

In other words, the electron current is noisy. It contains energy

at all sorts of frequencies. And this noisy current is circulating
close to a series of resonant cavities, which act as tuned circuits.
If they see energy at frequencies near their resonant frequency,
they seize it, and store it, swapping the energy between their
electric and magnetic fields just like any other tuned circuit.

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RF =
radio frequency

The energy oscillating around inside each cavity establishes its

own field - the RF field - which itself now interacts with the
circulating electron current.

Electrons passing though the RF field may give up some of their

energy to it, slowing them down and leaving them to fall into
the anode. Or they may gain energy from it, sending them back
towards the cathode.

The effect is to thin out the cloud, causing the electrons to collect
into bunches that rotate like the sails of a windmill (but not
really).

Ge ing the RF energy out is

not difficult. A pickup loop
can be placed inside any of
the cavities and coupled to
an external waveguide to
feed the load. In the lab, this
was simply a string of car headlamp bulbs to absorb the 400
wa s continuously delivered by the magnetron.

But a radar system uses short pulses of energy. The magnetron

is switched on briefly, then switched off again. If it's only on for
1% of the time, the average power output of 400 wa s means that
the output power of the short pulse sent to the antenna is a
hundred times bigger. 40 kW is a respectable amount of power,
especially when delivered by something the size of a cigare e
packet.

Suddenly, a laboratory curiosity had become the heart of next-

generation radar. For the first time it was possible to generate
significant amounts of microwave energy, and work began
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immediately on designing the new device into an airborne radar

system to help the night-fighters. There were many problems to
overcome, particularly with the brand-new type of aerial system
that would be required. Instead of simple dipoles, a system
operating at 10cm would need a scanning reflector dish, like a
searchlight, mounted in the aircraft's nose. The problems were
solved as they arose. Hand-built 10cm radar equipment (known
as AI Mk.VII) began to be installed in Beaufighters early in 1942

Magnetron stability and efficiency

In the diagram just
above (on the right)
illustrating how the
electron stream and
the RF field
interchange energy, I
deliberately showed
the adjacent RF fields
as being 180 degrees
out of phase with each
other. It is quite
possible that this may
not happen by itself. In fact, it often didn't happen. There's no
particular reason why it should.

The diagram on the left shows a magnetron with 8 cavities.

When the device begins to oscillate, the signals in each cavity
will have random phase differences from each other, and each
will have managed to extract a different amount of energy from
the electron current. The cavities are all coupled together via the
rotating 'spokes', so the phase differences will ji er about until
eventually some kind of steady state is reached, in which the RF
wave propagating around the anode hits a resonance.

Resonance could occur if (for example) each cavity locked into a

phase difference of 45 degrees from its neighbour, since 45 x 8 =
360 degrees. Or the phase difference might be 90 degrees, or 180
degrees. These are different modes of operation, and it turned out
that the device delivers the most power in the so-called π mode,
in which alternate cavities have 180 degrees phase difference.
Once the magnetron has found a stable state it will stay there
unless something disturbs it - like a sudden small change in
supply voltage, or cathode current, or even arcing in a cavity. If
that happens (and it's difficult to eliminate) the phase starts
jumping again, and power output drops. It took another stroke
of genius to see how to fix the problem.

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Back at Birmingham University, the original magnetron had

been developed to the point where it could deliver 70 kW, but
its efficiency was a miserable 10%. Efforts to get more power out
of it led to 'frequency jumping'. Then Prof. Sayers and Dr. Boot
(yes, the same man, but now with his doctorate) tried linking
every other slot together, with bits of copper wire. Every
alternate 'capacitor' is now effectively connected in parallel. The
instantaneous voltage across all the parallel 'capacitors' has to be
the same. These tuned circuits are compelled to operate in phase
with each other. Alternate cavities must then be 180 degrees out-
of-phase with their neighbours, so the magnetron is forced to run
in the π mode.

The result was almost magical. Efficiency jumped to 50%, and

pulsed power output could be increased five-fold to 350 kW.

The drawing of
a Beaufighter Magnetron in airborne radar
(right) from the
Observer's The AI Mk.VII
Book of
Airplanes (with the
(1943) unstrapped
carefully does
not show any
magnetron) was
radar antennas. designed as a
quick-and-dirty
The Mosquito
night fighter fix to get
(below) has microwave
centimetric airborne radar
radar fitted in
the nose. into service as
fast as possible. A hundred systems were built and installed in
Beaufighters, and between them they destroyed over 100 enemy
aircraft. Radar was still secret, so the night-fighter pilots' success
was solemnly a ributed to their exceptional night vision (and a
persistent rumour began that night vision was improved by
eating lots of carrots).

Its successor, the properly engineered AI. Mk.VIII, was ordered

in quantity (2,000 systems) from two separate suppliers. It
replaced the Mk.VII system in the Beaufighters as well as the
earlier 1.5m Mk.IV and Mk.V fi ed to Mosquitos.

The cavity magnetron first ran on the lab bench in Birmingham

in February 1940. By that summer, the British and American
governments had agreed on a deal whereby the British would
share their military technology in exchange for American
manufacturing expertise and capacity, producing equipment for
British use. The first example of the resulting American
centimetric radar, known as SCR-720, was test-flown in Britain
in January 1943. It was ordered in large quantities as AI Mk.X,

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and was fi ed to Mosquitos, then to Meteors, and later even to

Vampires and Venoms.

Useful sources
My thanks to Doug Robb and everyone at the Air Defence Radar
Museum at RAF Neatishead, near Norwich. You can easily
spend a day there!

Books

RDF1 Michael Bragg (Hawkhead, 2002)

This comprehensive survey of radar development uses the
official record to reconstruct what actually happened. It was
privately published, and is well worth tracking down.
The history of Air Intercept radar and the British nightfighter 1935-59
- Ian White (Pen & Sword, 2007)
Radio engineering - Frederick Emmons Terman (McGraw-Hill,
1937)
Admiralty handbook of Wireless Telegraphy Vol.II (HMSO, 1938)
Microwave tube transmi ers - L. Sivan (Kluwer, 1994)
Echoes of war - Sir Bernard Lovell (Adam Hilger, 1991)
Radar Days - E G Bowen (Adam Hilger, 1987)
Boffin - R Hanbury Brown (Adam Hilger, 1991)
Night intruder - Jeremy Howard-Williams (David & Charles,
1976)

Images
The photograph of the magnetron appears in the Radar
Museum's guidebook. I suspect the photographs of the towers
and the Ba le may be Crown copyright. I drew the diagrams.

Other related pages on this site

Engineering & physics index page > Energy storage in
capacitors Energy storage in inductors

Copyright © John Hearfield 2009, 2012 ... [Rev.2.3]

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