On the possibility of high power gyrotrons for super range resolution radar and atmospheric sensing

Abstract High power gyrotrons have been developed recently; this makes a number of high power millimeter wave oscillators available. Currently their main application is the heating of fusion plasmas. This examines other potential applications for these RF sources. If used in multipulse radar mode, the pulses may be somewhat different from each other and this must be considered. A variant of coherent-on-receive data processing can be used. With this, the entire pulse, not only the phase, is renormalized to a reference pulse. The data are analysed off line. Possible applications of the quasi-optical gyrotron in a radar mode include exploiting its wide tuning range to achieve super range resolution and also remotely sensing the distribution of the size of ice crystals in cirrus clouds. Possible applications of a fixed frequency (94 GHz) gyrotron in the radar mode include studying the structure of clouds. In a forward scatter mode, these high power sources could provide the capability to remotely sense the st...

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