Power characteristics of a high-performance helix traveling wave tube

Traveling Wave Tubes (TWT) are most widely used in civil, defense, and space applications as power amplifiers over a wide range of frequency. When a TWT works at a higher bandwidth, it suffers from nonlinearities, which affects the overall performance of the tube and hence the required results aren't achieved. So, optimization of a TWT is required, mainly in terms of its power characteristics. Power characteristics of the TWTs are specified in terms of output power at different input drive levels, AM/PM transfer and AM/PM conversions, input, and output back-off, gain at saturation, etc. Some of the linearity factors like 3rd order inter modulation product (IMP), and the 1 dB compression point are also optimized. An exhaustive study has been made to achieve the optimum performance of a 140W TWT in Ku-Band. The result has been validated by experimental results.