A metallic cage made by sputtering silver film onto a thin nylon thread thr
ough a specially designed fixture is used as perturbing object to measure t
he higher modes in a X-band accelerating structure. The fabrication and cal
ibration of the cage are described in this paper. It is found that this typ
e of perturbation object has the advantages of high sensitivity and high re
solution. Using the cage as bead, the longitudinal electric fields of TM110
mode in a X-band 30cm structure are obtained with bead pull measurements.