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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIA-08-0912-005) is dated 28 January 2010. The Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office prepared it under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It gives an overview of pulsed high-power microwave sources and the technologies needed to build them, including insulation, cathode materials, high-voltage switching, pulse generators and antennas. The paper concludes that progress requires better cathodes, switching and insulation, and that compact ultrawideband antennas will remain difficult to build.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 1/28/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys pulsed high-power microwave (HPM) source technology and argues that such systems remain of military interest because they can disrupt or damage electronic systems with short, intense electromagnetic pulses. The report reviews the main source types and the supporting technologies they depend on, including high-voltage insulation, switching, cathode materials, antennas, and pulse-power generation. It emphasizes the difficulty of building systems that are compact, efficient, and practical to field, since short pulse durations, antenna size, heating, detectability, and beam or signal quality all impose hard engineering limits. Its overall conclusion is that the technology has significant potential military value, but that further progress depends on advances in cathodes, predictive modeling, high-speed high-voltage switching, and low-loss insulation, while compact ultrawideband systems will remain difficult because of basic physical constraints on antenna design.
UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOR 8FFI@IAL tl91!! f>flt I Figure 7 is a closeup photograph of the same actual components as built and tested at the High Energy Research and Test Facility antenna range. This source was used extensively for testing in the 1990s, including remote tests in which the entire system, including the antenna, a screen room, and far-field diagnostics, was fitted into a trailer specially modified for the purpose. Figure 7. HS Output Section With the Point Geometry Converter Feeding an Extended Ground-Plane Antenna Through a Brewster Angle Window THE PHOENIX HPM SOURCE The Phoenix was a UWB source developed by the AFRL specifically for asset testing at the High-Energy Microwave Laboratory (HEML). The HEML has a large anechoic chamber and is capable of testing small fighter aircraft. The Phoenix had a ferrite core transformer-based system using two flowed oil switches to generate the fast rise-time voltage pulse. It was bulkier than the H-series sources and thus was less portable. An oil-processing platform with 1-micron filtering and a 5-horsepower DC motor driving the positive displacement oil pump was used. The pumping system was capable of a 7- gallon-per-minute flow rate through the two switches. The oil switches were designed into 50.Q parallel-plate transmission lines. The peaking switch electrode spacing was only 0.015 to 0.020 inches and was highly overvolted. The operating voltage was about 500 kV with a 90-ps rise time and a 1.25-ns pulse width. The peak power was 5 GW, and the radiated field at 9 meters was 45 kV/m, giving it an FOM of more than 400 kV. Phoenix had the fastest rise time of any HPM source to date. Figure 8 shows the waveform of the radiated field at a distance of 8.5 meters. Figure 9 shows the resulting spectral content. Note that the source has good spectral content beyond 2.5 GHz owing to the extremely fast rise time. UNCLASSIFIED/ /5iOA O5i5ilCI0I. Uili OPII.¥ 22
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 37 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.