Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Trying to test an early radar magnetron here. This is an early example of a radar magnetron as used by the military in the 1950s. Unfortunately, I lost some early video takes of the process, so kind of jumps in to the middle. There are quite a few variables to why this doesn’t just work from the start. The magnetron is new but was probably manufactured about 1960 so its condition isn’t really known. The field magnets are not available and I have cobbles together something which I think should produce a field close to the required but the overall geometry is less exact. The anode voltage is 27kV which is high for an experimental set-up. I have made a pulse transformer designed to create the HV pulse form a 1kV input, but unfortunately this suffered an insulation breakdown during firing. The experiment does look like some small amount of microwave energy was generated.
Content:
00:00 - Intro
01:30 - First set up
02:25 - Second set up
05:40 - Failure
Trying to test an early radar magnetron here. This is an early example of a radar magnetron as used by the military in the 1950s. Unfortunately, I lost some early video takes of the process, so kind of jumps in to the middle. There are quite a few variables to why this doesn’t just work from the start. The magnetron is new but was probably manufactured about 1960 so its condition isn’t really known. The field magnets are not available and I have cobbles together something which I think should produce a field close to the required but the overall geometry is less exact. The anode voltage is 27kV which is high for an experimental set-up. I have made a pulse transformer designed to create the HV pulse form a 1kV input, but unfortunately this suffered an insulation breakdown during firing. The experiment does look like some small amount of microwave energy was generated.
Content:
00:00 - Intro
01:30 - First set up
02:25 - Second set up
05:40 - Failure
