phones
could they make it specific to <i> switched on </i> electronics? Then they could fry all the annoying git's mobiles in the cinema/concert hall!
American boffins say they have developed a new and more powerful magnetron - a device used to produce microwaves - and that the day of the long-awaited, circuitry-frying electropulse raygun may as a result finally be at hand. The magnetron has actually been around since before World War II. It's a vital component in radars and …
Have they heard of it? Or in case of radio equipment, have they heard of optical encoders of the signal (so that in case of the attack, you need to replace only the relatively inexpensive antenna module)?
As for their "Active Denial System", I'm really waiting for it to be banned under Human Rights Convention - it will blind people instantly if directed at upper body parts due to the lens of the eye not having any way of quickly dissipating the heat. That's why their demos are only on single volunteers, directed at their legs - they can quickly switch the damn thing off if the subject trips and lands with his eyes in the striking range of the beam.
Mine's the one lined with tinfoil.
You mean, along with the projector (cinema), DMX lighting effects (concert hall) and sound systems (both)??
Not to mention the various alarm sensors, which in failure mode could trigger an alarm and evacuation condition...
Now, what's preferable to you? a couple of people's mobes going off, or complete lights and sounds failure accompanied by alarm bells and sprinkler activation, whilst everyone stampedes towards the exits that they cannot see as these places are designed to be completely dark in the absense of artificial light???
Sounds like fun... let me know when you're going to do it so that I can have a good laugh!
A bit drastic, don't you think? Especially if you fried some unfortunate person's heart pacemaker as well.
In the USA, auditoriums are often equipped with mobile-phone "jammers". That moniker is probably inaccurate - I suspect it's a sort of gimmicked femtocell base-station to which all phones in the auditorium will connect, and once connected, they'll receive no calls or texts from it. In the UK, such devices aren't legal. They should be permitted (perhaps subject to licensing and site surveying to make sure they don't "leak".)
BTW you can buy a genuine jammer on the "black" market, and probably on E-bay. However, do ask yourself whether you'd want it turned on in your vicinity when you had a heart attack ... one reason they are *totally* illegal.
Not possible I'm afraid; the power of microwave ovens is limited by the power output of a domestic mains socket, after taking into account the effeciency of the magnetron.
If this technology makes magnetrons more effecient, rather than merely having a higher power density (the article isn't clear about this) then it's possible that microwaving a curry-for-one would be faster. Even then, time needs to be allowed for the 'food' to heat evenly; hence the 'take out and stir' step in most microwave recipies.
Assuming a theoretical 100% effecient microwave, the maximum power would be 3120W (240v x 13A). I estimate that this could cook a 2-min bag of microwaveable rice in 32 seconds (vs. 2 mins in a current 850w output oven).
Indeed sir.
I just hope that the batteries for such a menacing device would not be manufactured by Sony- imagine the destruction caused by a huge exploding li-ion battery attached to an operating 5kw microwave!
If that happened, could you consider your curry to be adequately 'cooked'? :)
/flames, obviously
When your car gets zapped by lightning its body work acts as a Faraday Cage, but that doesn't stop your mobile phone working.
@ Martin 19 "the power of microwave ovens is limited by the power output of a domestic mains socket, after taking into account the effeciency of the magnetron." If that were true then microwave ovens in the states would take twice as long to cook as ours because of there 110v system. But they don't cos your wrong.
...will become able to pop your popcorn or heat up your frozen Hungry Hombre ranch-style jumbo meal-slab feast module in seconds rather than interminable minutes."
Wouldn't the food have to be able to conduct heat through itself fast enough? Otherwise it'd just burn.
And Mythbusters did a thing about Microwaves heating things up from the inside out. Apparently they don't.
Also, does anyone else think that the new Magnetron in the linked article looks a bit half-life-ish?
I actually live in a faraday cage, not a perfect one mind, but near enough.
It does render radio waves useless, and wi-fi is a nightmare (I now have cabled the house with cat5) but mobiles work just fine. Even the (analog) walkabout phone works. Digital ones don't work very well (DECT I think it is).
Oh, and the small power distribution point 100 yards away at one end of a long rectangular faraday cages means you can actually hear/feel the power supply when you're in the living room (end nearest the power dist. point).
As to why I live in a faraday cage, ask the twat who decided to re-build the C17 thatched cottage with wire mesh and concrete instead of lathe and plaster....and THEN get the effing thing listed.
Bah.
My Father was an engineer during the second world war. He worked on high power systems and Magnetrons for the military…radar jamming technology - a very loud white noise microwave generator. He didn’t talk much about it citing legal issues like The official secrecy act but did mention once that even back then they where attempting to use focused microwaves to disrupt electronics…Curious that my Mother who was in Military Intelligence received a letter from the government releasing her from the Official Secrets Act but my father never received any such release letter, He used to joke about it ….good luck on prosecuting him he passed into the night fifteen years ago..
They almost have the ray gun. now were is my jet pack and flying car they said we would have by the turn of the century...
A thin sheet of alu foil will stop this weapon dead in its tracks, better yet, use a copper coil to transfer the electrical power into some batteries that power your own personal rail gun!
This kind of weapon would be easy to take out with a missile, it would show up 100s of miles away.
I will stick with sharks with frickin laser beams on thier heads, thank you very much.
As we all know, you don't need to bathe Wall St in microwaves (or anything) for it to cause a global financial and economic crisis. Just leave the silly money-grubbing buggers alone without keeping a close eye on them for a while and they'll screw it up all by themselves...
""the power of microwave ovens is limited by the power output of a domestic mains socket, after taking into account the effeciency of the magnetron." If that were true then microwave ovens in the states would take twice as long to cook as ours because of there 110v system. But they don't cos your wrong"
Voltage is not a measure of power output. May I humbly suggest that you go back to your high school physics text books and re-read them to find out why it is you, sir, who are wrong.
Also your primary school spelling primer - there, they're and their are different words and mean different things.
If you're going to act like an acerbic twit at least get your facts right.*
*Free lesson in different meanings of "your" and "you're" thrown in for good measure!
Put one of these outside an airport, aimed at passport control, one short blip per 5 minutes or so. No more RFID passports..
"Sir, your passport doesn't work". "Yeah, I work with microwave equipment. Serves you right for not providing adequate shielding". "Ah, I see. This unfortunately means we will need to perform a cavity search"
"Noooooo! Not with those big hands!!"
You still can't win :-)
Mine's the one with the lubricator..
Magnetrons have been around a lot longer than the WWII era. They were initially developed by Albert Hull, at GE, in the 1920s, as an outgrowth of his work in using magnetic fields to control electron tubes as a way of getting around DeForest's patents on the triode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hull#Magnetron
Dave
the mil directed energy weapons ongoing development reached megawatts very quickly , are currently at gigawatt outputs and are trending to terawatt power levels. There was some debate that inverse square law doesn't quite apply when you're ionising the medium you're propagating thru' but I don't want to get into that now! perfect faraday cages will attenuate/reflect a lot of the RF energey but do you have ANY gaps or ANY wires in/out? powerlines/phones/water/gas pipes?? any antennas on the roof?? TV/radio/cable/sat? well, some of these RF weapons perform an RF 'survey' - > hundred metres stand-off RF network analysis S11/S21 stuff, then couple the terawatt to the most penetrative frequencies. Quote "if the bunker has a single wire to the surface I can scope that then take him out" (backdoor coupling in the jargon, hence icon!)
> Merkins have a lower voltage
News to me.
We have 240v to the house. The transformer up on the pole has a tap. We run three wires to the house, the third wire (neutral/ground) is attached to the center tap on the transformer. Thus we get 240 for water heaters, stoves, ovens, and to charge our electric cars and rayguns; and 120v for everything else.
Wish you guys would get this figured out. It's not too much different than what you have: 408v 3-phase up on the poles. Your transformer on the pole has three taps, you take any two to give you 240v.
"How long before the enemy/criminals have the plans?"
If the plan is to use expendable pilotless drones to deliver this weapon, not long at all.
IIRC during WWII the use of microwave radar sets in aircraft that flew over enemy occupied territory was forbidden for a long, long time, as the magnetrons were virtually indestructible, and any aircraft that failed to make it home was likely to gift the technology to the Germans, even if not much else on the plane survived.
As the centimetric radar was being put to excellent effect in the battle against the U-boats in the North Atlantic, the Royal Navy (and RAF Costal Command) were dead set against letting Bomber Command fit them in their Lancasters, as the Germans would be able to work out why their subs were suddenly vulnerable to aircraft when charging their batteries by snorkel at night (the snorkel and periscope were far too small to be picked up by conventional RADAR, and were practically impossible to see by Mark I Eyeball even in good daylight conditions).
Once the bombers were given the sets, which proved an invaluable navigation and bomb-aiming aid, they were codenamed H2S, because "it stinks that we were not allowed them sooner".
I don't know if the design is much more 'fragile' when made from Mu-metal than it was with the old copper magnetrons, but if they are not, I doubt that they are going to be totally destroyed in a crash, even if a fairly large demolition charge is provided for the purpose.
"Terrorists would not use it against civilians directly. The more likely usage scenario would be firing such a weapon against Wall Street to cause mass economic mayhem."
The banks seem to be doing that just fine on there own.....
Every second Biggles adventure at least mentions a frightening new device which can affect a plane's magnetic compass and then kill its ignition to bring it down. 60 years later, it *might* be happening. Why don't we all just go and live in the world of fiction? Things are easier to invent there.