Design of Magnetron Transmitter for Doppler Weather Radar

The small size Doppler weather radar with magnetron transmitter is good at performance to price ratio and simple for operation and maintenance. It is very suitable for the weather forecast and weather modification operation guide. How to design a high performance transmitter for such radar is described in this paper. The transmitter consists of an 800 V high-voltage power supply, a high-voltage pulse modulator, a filament power supply, an x-band magnetron, and a controlling and protection circuit module. Among them, the high-voltage pulse modulator, controlling and protection circuit module are the major contents of the transmitter design. The high-voltage pulse modulator consists of a high-voltage capacitor for electric charge storage, a trigger driving circuit, a high-power switch with electronic device such as IGBT, a high voltage and current pulse transformer, etc. The controlling and protection circuit module is provided the security function for trigger pulse, mean radiation power, high-voltage pulse level and magnetron operation current, etc. Experiments show that the high-voltage pulse modulator has good driving performance and high efficiency for the magnetron with voltage of 5.6 kV, power smaller than 10kW and cycle duty no more than 1%. This magnetron transmitter has played an outstanding role in the application of the WXRMD- 10 radar.