Affordable Compact HPRF/HPM Attack Warning System

SA Photonics’ Wideband Agile Threat Sensor (WATS) addresses the Navy’s need for an affordable and compact High-Power Radio Frequency / High-Power Microwave (HPRF/HPM) attack warning technology that detects, characterizes and precisely geo-locates HPRF threats while being fully immune to HPRFs. WATS consists of multiple completely passive HPM probes connected by fiber optic cables to an electronic processing system. The probes relay signals by modulating light in the optical fiber and returning it for processing by the processing unit. Since this connection between the processing system and the remotely-located sensors has no electric conductors at all, the sensors can be located for best timing and direction-of-arrival (TDOA) sensitivity; the length of the connection has no effect on the system’s robustness in the presence of HPRF/HPM attack waveforms. Furthermore, WATS’s tolerance of extremely high electromagnetic amplitudes enables the system to survive repeated exposure to attack without losing sensitivity.