HTSCHANNELISERFOR USEINAN ESM RECIEVERSYSTEM

Animportant function ofanESMreceiver istheacquisition andidentification ofall signals that maybepresent intheEW environment. Ideally thereceiver requires ahigh probability ofintercept. Current receiver types include wideopensystems which suffer fromsignal overlap andscanning superheterodyne receivers whichhavealowprobability ofintercept against somesignals. Theideal solution would bechannelisation ofthesearch bandwidth with eachchannel monitored continuously. Toobtain highfrequency resolution manynarrow bandwidth channels arerequired. Ifconventional filter technology isutilised theinsertion losses andchanneliser size maybe unacceptably large. Byusing high temperature superconductor (HTS) materials, acompact charneliser with lowloss filters mayberealised. This paper describes thedesign andbuild ofa demonstrator, theprinciple ofwhichcould ultimately cover 2-18GHz operation. This uses100MHz bandwidth superconducting filters inorder toachieve acceptable size, weight, power dissipation and cool-down time.