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Russia's Rostech Corporation is to unveil a super-high frequency weapon capable of taking down all kinds of drones, missiles and other high precision weapons. The presentation will be made at the Army-2015 military expo. The Mosow Radio Engineering Institute has developed a super-high frequency (SHF) "cannon." It's designed to knock out aircraft, drones, guided missiles and any airborne high precision weapons using electronics. The cannon creates an air-exclusion zone within a reported radius of over 10 kilometers around the defended object or installation, though the system's exact characteristics are classified.
"This mobile microwave irradiation complex performs off-frequency rejection of electronics aboard low-altitude aerial targets and warheads of high precision weapons," a source in Rostech Corporation told TASS, adding this system puts close range air defenses on a whole new level. "In terms of performance capabilities, the complex has no competitors in the world," the source said. All the equipment is mounted on a tracked Buk missile air defense transportation platform.
http://rt.com/news/267187-shf-cannon-russia-drones/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
NOTE: I wandered around the net for several minutes, looking for alternative news sources on this cannon. I found exactly three other sources, all of which quote RT. Propaganda? Vaporware? You'll have to decide for yourself.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday June 16 2015, @03:07AM
The Soviets, like the Americans, have perfected the art of "misinformation".
Advanced technologies have become almost like magic.
We all know one can focus high frequency/microwave beams... ( that's those dishes on antennas ).
Now, do they really have the capacity to focus a sharp EMP type SHF RF burst at the intensity to fry well shielded electronics packages 10KM away?
I could only speculate given a good team of engineers, and funding, my guess is that this is quite feasible.
I have heard that old-school spark-gap transmitters can be quite disruptive if focused, as an electrical discharge in air has such a fast risetime. I can easily see peak powers of a military weapon working with that principle having gigawatts of peak power while drawing a few hundred KW of average power. Looks like it would be great for destroying PN junctions in picoseconds.
The "air exclusion zone" sounds a bit far fetched, as a lot of stuff has no problem traveling in space, and at very high altitudes, one is almost in space.
However, no one except the perpetrator of this know for sure whether this thing does exists or if it is a hoax. Its a poker game at its best. Raise or call. Video "evidence" of a successful operation can be faked.
Maybe we have to provide some faction warring with Russia a drone and see if the Russians shoot it down with it.
Knowledge of whether this thing really exists for sure is the province of military classified information.
Sounds almost like another Tom Clancy novel in the making...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @03:43AM
There are many anti-armor munitions that are programmed or simply kinetically designed to attack the least-armored side: the top. Combine that with this invention being placed on a Buk and it is not really a threat. A shell, a sabot, a missile already lined up and at speed will not be stopped by guidance system failure. At worse, operating procedure will have to add another conditional: If SHF detected fire one unaffected munition at source before using vulnerable ordinance.
It is some neat tech though. Would be very useful against lower-tech or poorly outfitted adversaries.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday June 16 2015, @08:57AM
> It is some neat tech though. Would be very useful against lower-tech or poorly outfitted adversaries.
Depends just how low-tech. Would this weapon be any use against a WWII-era fighter like a Spitfire or a Zero?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @02:04PM
That is a worthless statement isn't it? The thing would not be viable against rocks and sticks either. Why didn't you point that out?
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday June 16 2015, @02:58PM
Well, if this very expensive bit of kit could be foiled by a relatively low-cost, easy to build counter-aircraft, then surely that's significant.
There has been criticism of Western militaries arming and equipping to fight another cold war / another WWII, when in fact the only people they actually fight these days are AK-wielding guerillas in the middle of the desert against whom aircraft carriers, air-superiority jets and cruise missiles are of far less use than thousands and thousands of boots on the ground. Could this be Russians falling into the same trap? I can easily imagine some Russian military commander imagining himself completely immune to everything in the sky, then scrambling for his rifle as he sees some home-built single-prop kamikaze planes buzzing in towards him...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @07:54AM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 16 2015, @11:47AM
fry well shielded electronics packages 10KM away
Before it got all "beam weaponed" up by the star wars inspired PR department, half a century ago we called them "radio jammers".
SHF is "close enough for govt work" to include jamming GPS and satellite links and many remote control links. So ... no GPS, no remote control, no monitoring WTF its doing. All you got is inertial guidance and Maybe IR/visual but at those speeds...
Also I imagine "kill" is similar PR work applied to a mission fail. So the anti tank rocket slams into a sand dune instead of the tank, you didn't "kill" the missile you just made it miss. You could "kill" a drone by Fing with it as it flys thru a complicated mountain pass, or just F with its GPS until it thinks its at 10K feet but its actually eating dirt. Or I suppose if your GPS jamming was really hot stuff you could kill a drone by convincing it to fly into another drone.
You can incinerate things using microwave energy but its more useful just to jam them.
Another thing to think about is incinerating a multi thousand pound lump of steel is quite impressive. But incinerating a microscopic gold wire connecting the gate of an ultra low noise pre-amp in a sensitive GPS unit might only take a watt or two. Ham radio literature has many reports of people driving by an airport with a mobile 1296 weak signal system, some plane emits a 1 watt pulse on 1090 transponder, and your input preamp is burned out dead and you're off the air, although your entire 3000 pound car was not killed or incinerated. You can build a shitty preamp that can handle +80 dBmW input, its just going to have a noise figure something like 60 dB or more which is going to ruin the signal to noise ratio badly enough that you're not going to do what you wanted to do with that 0.75 dB noise figure input stage.