Session J5P - Poster Session: Plasma Sources and Applications of Plasmas II.
POSTER session, Wednesday morning, November 18
Imperial Ballroom, Fairmont
We have completed our Phase 1 SBIR research (I. Alexeff et.al.,Paper 6p36, P. 277, 1998 IEEE ICOPS Conference Record, June 1-4, Raleigh, NC), and the results have been much better than anticipated. The plasma antenna is composed of a U-shaped discharge tube that is ionized by a pulsed electrical discharge. It was tested both as a transmitting and as a receiving antenna in the afterglow mode. The stealth feature are two: First, when the antenna is not energized, it is simply a nonconducting glass tube that does not reflect incident radio signals in the manner that a resonant metal antenna does; Second, if an intense microwave pulse, such as is used in electronic warfare, strikes the energized antenna, and if the plasma frequency in the antenna is sufficiently low, the incident intense microwave pulse simply passes through the plasma antenna without interaction or reflection. The most significant new expetimental results are: First, that the plasma antenna performs at least as well as a similarly-configured metal antenna over the frequency range investigated-100 MHz to 1 GHz; Second, the plasma noise level in both the receiving and transmitting modes was comparable to the metal antenna.