An RF-Primed All-Halogen Gas Plasma Microwave High Power Receiver Protector

A new type of keepalive for gaseous hybrid waveguide receiver protectors is shown to provide reliable and reproducible power limiting. The design allows halogen gases to be used in place of conventional gasfills, resulting in extremely fast recovery periods independent of duty cycle over a wide range. Recovery periods less than 100 nsec were measured at incident power levels of 200 watts peak at X-band frequencies over a duty cycle range of 0.00005 to 0.5.