Signal Progress: Early Developments in U.S. Radar TR Switching

When Privates George Elliott and Joseph Lockard discovered a large fleet of airplanes approaching Pearl Harbor, Hawai'i, on the morning of 7 December 1941, they were operating a new U.S. Army Signal Corps radar that used the same antenna for transmitting and receiving RF energy [1]. RF engineers had to quickly develop a variety of new techniques to keep the multikilowatt transmitter signals from degrading or damaging the sensitive receivers in those early systems. This past December marked the 75th anniversary of that event. Tying in with the exhibit of related hardware at the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society's (MTT-S) 2017 International Microwave Symposium in Honolulu this June, the goal of this article is to highlight some of the components and circuits used for transmit-receive (T/R) switching in U.S. radars from the pre-World War II era through the following few decades.