diy Gyrotrons?

tubes with e-beams in air. But no diy Gyrotrons as yet? (It's like building a laser, but for 100GHz microwave. Early 1980s tech. The physics-hobbyists are not on the ball!

ke some insect-frying EM weapons, to clear certain skies of locust-swarms ( heh, toasted grasshoppers, ready for harvesting.) Get a small plane, and be am some complicated artwork onto new crops of wheat?

Electron beams don't go all that far in air. We seems to have had laser-zap ping project for mosquitos here at one point. which could have worked, but it seems that it would have needed Star Wars level lasers with built-in cor rection for the self-defocussing effects of high-powered laser beams in air , which wouldn't have been remotely cost effective.

On a sunny day (Fri, 26 Feb 2021 16:15:43 -0800 (PST)) it happened Bill Beaty wrote in :

About gyrotron:

Then good thing that this is about microwave sources. "Gyrotron" is good f or hundreds GHz, apparently behaves almost like thermal IR. Heh, portabl e megawatt gyrotron, isn't that the ray-projector carried by HG Wells' Mar tian invaders? It might even make SF sound effects, if the PS switcher end s up in the beam, making Flash Gordon raygun noises by ambient water vapor in the beam path.

But no hobbyists built one? Many built pulsed N2 TEA, and hundreds-watt c w CO2 w/rf drive, even hand-blown HeNe lasers back in the day. Gyrotrons look a bit simpler. Plus, they're an excellent excuse for digging out tha t old high-watts HV Fusor power supply, that some of us still have in our b asements.