[Milsurplus] British First

[William Donzelli]

> Yes the British invented the first RADAR. The U.S. invented the magnetron
> sure but since when is a magnetron a RADAR?

It is widely acknowledged that radar is a near perfect example of
"simultaneous invention". The idea was well established (ask the sonar
folks about it), and the late 1930s happened to be the time when the
technology caught up.

It should be mentioned that the klystron almost always gets dismissed when
people talk about the importance of the magnetron to radar. This is really
a shame. The truth is that the klystron was just as important as the
magnetron - without it the magnetron would have made only a small mark on 
radar development.

One of the reasons the British gave the Americans the cavity magnetron is
that they really did not know what to do with it. Sure, it made very large
pulses in the (near) microwave range, but they had no decent receiver for
such a radar system. Remember, back in 1940, getting triodes to work
around 600 MHz as local oscillators was not too easy! Had the klystron
never come about, the magnetron based radars probably would never make it
into S band, and certainly not into X band. The later ASV and AI radars,
H2S and H2X, and decent CGI radar would simply not have existed. 

William Donzelli
aw288 at osfn.org