Changing EW Environment Requires Even Higher RF Power

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•White Paper: Changing EW Environment Requires Even Higher RF Power

By Joe Hajduk, dB Control

The theme of AOC’s 47th Annual International Symposium and Convention is "Electronic Warfare in a Changing Environment." One aspect of the EW environment that’s changing rapidly is the increased sophistication and persistence of threat radars. Today’s threat radar detection systems must rapidly discriminate between real targets and those created by digital RF memories (DRFMs). A DRFM captures signals, digitizes them, reconverts them to their analog origin, and then rebroadcasts them, usually after modifying the signal based on a library of known emitters. The rebroadcast signal can be altered to change the target’s radar cross-section, range, speed, angle of arrival, and direction. It can also create false targets behind the target (reactive jamming) and ahead of it (predictive jamming) to trick radar detection systems into mislocating or misidentifying the target.

Ever since warfare became “electronic,” most of these systems have relied on the vacuum tube, and more specifically, the traveling wave tube amplifier (TWTA), to produce high microwave frequencies of up to 100 GHz and very high power levels over a broad bandwidth. While solid-state amplifiers are smaller and lighter than TWT amplifiers, even the most impressive gallium nitride (GaN), silicon LDMOS, or GaAs RF power transistors produce at most just over 1 kW of RF power, and then only at comparatively low frequencies. While some solid-state devices have achieved a wide frequency range of 2 to 18 GHz, their output power maxes out at about 20 W. The ideal solution is to exploit the inherent advantages of solid-state and tube technologies to deliver the best of both worlds — which is exactly what a microwave power module (MPM) achieves.

Click Here To Download:
•White Paper: Changing EW Environment Requires Even Higher RF Power