Reply to post:

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

whitepines

But the magnesium wire *is* the resistive circuit.

I'm wondering if a.) peak power levels were a couple orders of magnitude higher (still fairly safe even at 20W peak) and b.) the magnesium wire coupled tightly enough to the signal that it started sparking over internally instead of thermally heating. All it would take is a weak spark in a nearly pure oxygen environment to get the magnesium going...still, a heck of a coincidence for the radar to be close enough to a resonant frequency of the wire to make that work.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon