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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: 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.