Ultra-High Power and Efficiency Space Traveling-Wave Tube Amplifier Power Combiner With Reduced Size and Mass for NASA Missions

In the 2008 IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society International Microwave Symposium Digest version of our paper, recent advances in high power and efficiency space traveling-wave tube amplifiers for NASA´s space-to-Earth communications are presented. The RF power and efficiency of a new K-band amplifier are 40 W and 50% and that of a new K-band amplifier are 200 W and 60%. An important figure-of-merit, which is defined as the ratio of the RF power output to the mass (W/kg) of a traveling-wave tube (TWT), has improved by a factor of 10 over the previous generation Ka-band devices. In this paper, a high power high efficiency Ka -band combiner for multiple TWTs, based on a novel hybrid magic-T waveguide circuit design, is presented. The measured combiner efficiency is as high as 90%. In addition, at the design frequency of 32.05 GHz, error-free uncoded binary phase-shift keying/quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) data transmission at 8 Mb/s, which is typical for deep-space communications, is demonstrated. Furthermore, QPSK data transmission at 622 Mb/s is demonstrated with a low bit error rate of 2.4 times10^-8, which exceeds the deep-space state-of-the-art data rate transmission capability by more than two orders of magnitude. A potential application of the TWT combiner is in deep-space communication systems for planetary exploration requiring transmitter power on the order of a kilowatt or higher.