I recently inherited a microwave oven with a damaged door latch. The
magnetron works, but the rest of the oven isn't worth saving. Before I
cannibalize it for parts (like the HV supply and some kewl magnets), are
there any (safe and legal) uses for the working magnetron?
I'm ruling out microwave weapons, anti police radar devices, etc for
obvious reasons, but if there's something to be done with this before
destroying it, I might add it to my projects list.
Links to project web sites would probably be best. Thanks.
http://amasci.com/weird/microwave/voltage1.html
I'll toss out one extra personal experience, too. In the last year of
high school, we had a science teacher with a masters in physics from
Northwestern University and a grand total of 7 students in the
advanced class. We used a klystron, not a magnetron, and the
wavelength you are talking about is about 5 inches I think, which is
somewhat shorter than what we were working with then. But we "beamed"
the klystron into the classroom from a desk on one side at a "crystal"
we'd built with tin-foil-wrapped Styrofoam balls stuck together with
sticks. These allowed us to use watt-meters, held by hand, to measure
different points on the other side of the "crystal", graph them, and
derive the diffraction patterns from the resulting measurements.
I remember some tinkering to get it running well and at the time I
didn't have any idea what a waveguide was, but it gave a great
hands-on, macro-scale understanding to how x-ray crystallography
works.
I'm not so sure I'd do anything like this with a 2.4GHz magnetron and
some adapted waveguide, blasting an open room in which I was wandering
around taking measurements. Also, your own body in this case may be a
problem, since you are mostly water and you could interfere way too
much with what you were trying to measure. So I don't think this
lesson would be safe or as useful an educational tool, unless you
found another way to take those measurements.
This comes from someone (me) who made "rocket candy fuel" from melting
potassium nitrate and sugar in a florence flask/beaker double-boiler
using boiling sulfuric acid as the bath to keep hot spots from forming
(melt temp was about 300C, flash point about 400C), and where I'm
nestled behind piles of sand bags I'd set up in the garage, just in
case. And that was only one of many different mixtures I experimented
with, including making mercury fulminate and nitroglycerin. So you
might consider a little, before you beam yourself or some hapless
volunteer with a dispersed 1kW beam of 2.4GHz at a distance of a few
dozen feet away.
No way would I do today what I was doing back then. (Or maybe I
really would, given half an excuse, and just won't say so in public.
Best of luck,
Jon