SRC-269

Microwave and Millimeter Wave Power Beaming.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-1134 The field's own 2021 scorecard: the two records were both set in 1975 (30-35 kW across about a mile, and 54 per cent DC in to DC out at short range), and in the 45 years since, nobody listed has reported more than about a kilowatt of DC delivered, or more than about a fifth of the wall-plug power coming out as DC.
• CLM-1135 Modern power beaming, by the review's dating, starts in 1963 with a radar tube, a horn five and a half metres away and a single vacuum-tube rectifier: 100 watts out for about 670 in. The same year the rectenna was invented by giving every little dipole its own diode.
• CLM-1136 The famous 1964 helicopter hung fifteen metres up for ten hours on beamed microwaves, rectified by four and a half thousand diodes; then the Air Force lost interest and the idea went to NASA.
• CLM-1137 In 1987 a Canadian model plane with a four-and-a-half-metre wingspan flew for twenty minutes at 150 metres on nothing but a microwave beam from a dish below, 150 watts to the motor from 400 watts per square metre at the aircraft.
• CLM-1138 A 1994 Japanese test sent five kilowatts from a three-metre dish to an eleven-square-metre rectenna 42 metres away and caught about three-quarters of the beam; what came out as DC is not stated.
• CLM-1139 A 1995 Japanese blimp carrying a three-by-three-metre rectenna flew for four minutes at fifty metres on ten kilowatts of microwaves from two magnetrons and a dish.
• CLM-1141 In 2002 a metre-wide rectenna moved along an exhibition floor in Houston, tracked by a self-steering 5.8 GHz beam, converting 82 per cent of what hit it to DC in front of ten thousand people.
• CLM-1142 In 2015 Mitsubishi Heavy sent ten kilowatts of microwaves half a kilometre along a Kobe pier to an eight-by-eight-metre receiver, enough to light up its logo; the review gives no figure for how much came out the other end.
• CLM-1143 Japan's flagship 2015 ground test: a solid-state GaN array of about one and a half square metres sent 1.8 kilowatts 55 metres and 335 watts of DC came out, under a fifth of the microwave power and about one-fifteenth of the DC that went in, with the beam self-steering onto the receiver.
• CLM-1144 In 2019 the same Japanese array put four kilowatts per square metre onto a paperback-sized rectenna under a hovering drone ten metres up, giving about 60 watts, not enough to fly it but enough to stretch the battery.

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