This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES 1 Experimental Study ofMicrowave Pulse Compression

Abstract—This paper presents the experimental study of mi-crowave pulse compression using a five-fold helically corrugated waveguide. In the experiment, the maximum power compression ratio of 25.2 was achieved by compressing an input microwave pulse of 80-ns duration and 9.65–9.05-GHz frequency swept range into a 1.6-ns Gaussian-envelope pulse. For an average input power of 5.8 kW generated by a conventional traveling-wave tube, a peak pulse output power of 144.8 kW was measured corresponding to an energy efficiency of 66.3%. Index Terms—Helically corrugated waveguides (HCWs), mi-crowave pulse compression, mode coupling. I