High Pulsed Power Compact Antenna for High-Power Microwaves Applications

Thales Communications and Security has developed, under Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives contract, a new concept of compact antenna able to radiate very high pulsed power levels in C-band and X-band. These antennas could be powered by relativistic sources, such as magnetrons or backward wave oscillators (BWO). This antenna principle is based on an array of helixes, whose dimensions are linked to the desired gain and central frequency. Pulsed power-typically a few hundreds of megawatts-feeds the antenna via a circular waveguide in TM01 mode. These works were successfully verified with a first example of such an antenna, developed in X-Band and tested with a BWO delivering 10-ns long and 500-MW peak pulses, repeated at 100 Hz.