Are Microwave Guns For Real?

Almost exactly one year ago, [Kreosan] published a video detailing an EM “weapon” built out of three magnetrons, some batteries, and a taser. It all seemed a bit too good to be true, so [Allen] decided to try and replicate the results for himself.

[Kreosan]’s original video was impressive, showing everything from home stereos to a humble moped exploding when in the presence of their powerful device. However, many of those watching the video doubted the footage. Most criticism centered around the nature of the power supply to the magnetron falling short of the usual 700-1000W seen in a microwave oven.

Initial testing with a single magnetron. This setup could light the bulb at a distance of a few centimeters.

[Allen] starts by experimenting with a single magnetron, successfully using it to light a compact fluorescent bulb at a range of a few centimeters. Scaling up to the full triple magnetron setup with a cardboard and foil feedhorn, [Allen] is, at best, able to crash a calculator at a distance of a few feet.

The microwaves cause no explosions, and the device doesn’t seem to have anywhere near the 50-foot range claimed by [Kreosan] for their device. [Allen] puts forth the theory that the explosions seen in the original footage are far more likely to be from small firecrackers rather than any electronic components dying from microwaves.

Overall it’s a solid attempt to recreate someone else’s work to verify the results, a cornerstone of science. We did bristle somewhat at the valiant 18650 being described as a “vape battery”, however. For more microwave goodness, check out this attempt to recreate the TSA’s body scanners.

65 thoughts on “Are Microwave Guns For Real?

  1. Upon reading about the exploding nonsense I was reminded of this…
    Back in the late 1980s a cousin of mine who was in the Navy and *supposedly* went to school to be an electrical engineer told me that he was going to build a radar jammer that would blow up a cop’s radar gun. I tried in vain to explain to him that if it could fry the electronics in a cop car 1/4 mile away that it would utterly cook you if it was inside the car with you due to how much power you’d need. I got nothing but arguements about “well how do you know if you don’t try” and no amount of “received power is an inverse square of the distance” type reasoning would convince him otherwise. Thankfully he never got a job in EE as far as I’m aware and now he’s a mostly inadequate IT admin(he installed Norton on my dad’s home computer as well as removing the firewall is how I’m certain of this).

          1. That reminds me, a few years back I had to fire my Director of Evil Genius Castle Security, he’d had sharks with lazy beans on their heads in my moat for 16 months before I noticed… thankfully it was rather easy to let him go, I’d just written him up the previous week for hiring men who couldn’t shoot straight.

        1. They exist ! they give concussions, they damage cognitive functions in the brain that is Irreversible it will also damage vision and you will see blinking lights, white or blue. more damage with multiple attacks will do more damage with each attack. They also can produce synthetic telepathy, I know, sounds far fetched , if I didn’t know what I know I’d call b.s.. these are not new weapons but what is new is there small portable size. That’s about all I’m going to say.

      1. And that’s why I have not answered the requests to change my pre-pay meter to “Smart” vulnerable, hackable, easily tampered with meters.

        I found that if I have credit topped up of over 30-GBP then they don’t keep asking… as soon as their system guesstimates that the credit has gone <0-GDP (i.e. emergency credit) then I start getting that, "your meter is being phased out" letters again… I tried it intentionally:

        It ran low, got letter.
        averaged 10-GBP, got letter.
        Topped up by 50-GDP, no letter, credit almost lasted 2 months.
        Topped up by 10-GDP, got no letter.
        Allowed emergancy, got no letter.
        Topped by 10-GDP, no letter.
        Topped 10 again, letter.
        Topped 10 again, letter.
        Topped 30-GDP, no letter.
        (repeat)

        Patterns emerge, so obvious!

        Dear E.ON: We are not retards!!!
        We know what the smart meters are for, they're only smart to you guys and other nefarious spies!!!

      2. Here is some padding example to work around some philteration
        @annie
        Being a pre-pay, that $30 charge isn’t existent. The key gets read by a machine that tells E.ON the status, the key gets written with an amount and the machine the key plugs into reads the amount and invalidates it before setting the emergency bit on the key and writing the last status.
        It takes about 5 seconds from key insert to beep-beep and the amount topped up flashes up with an etched into the LCD “Key accepted” logo displays.

        P.S. borrowing someone elses handle for certain reasons….

        and this footer is to slide past the airport security :)

    1. My dad actually did that.

      He was positioned at Quansit Bay shipyard in RI. Worked in Comms. I forget which Navy Ship. But to get to the shipyard you had to go down a stupidly slow road for 5 miles. Some cop would sit on it, ticketing navy soldiers. So my dad and a few got together and “fixed it”.

      On a carrier class, there’s a nuclear generator for radio and comms and electronics. So, they took control of the radar targeting array, and aimed the tracking radar in the cop’s direction and turned it on for a few milliseconds. All they knew afterward was when they went hope, the cop’s car was left with no cop in sight. He never sat on that section of road again.

      My dad’s dead, so it’s not like they can court martial him.

      1. Plausible. There’s some serious power in those radars, but you would need line of sight to the target, and a radar antenna that could tilt down to aim at the car (antennas are up high, for best range).

        CSB: Former co-worker worked on B-52 electronics at a remote AF base. One late shift, they were bored, listening to Johnny Carson on the aircraft’s ECM receiver. They had the brilliant idea of jamming the punchlines to his monologue. Because of the way the jammer worked, they could hear the punchlines through the jamming. Next day, they were the only ones who know the punchlines. Apparently, the base commander was not amused, and wanted to see the duty roster for the late shift at the electronics shop…

      2. I don’t know anything about the validity of your story but… cooking microscopic transistor gates in a radar gun and causing the macroscopic flashes and bangs of a Kreosan video are two very different things. The fact the car remained was interesting to me. I am wondering what decade this was. Were cars of the era dependent on computerized electronics yet?

        1. IDK, I’ve seen some pretty macroscopic flashes and bangs on the bench from circuits under power when something goes wrong.

          There’s a bit of a wildcard factor also in how likely a given piece of kit is to have a trace or wire that’s close to resonant with the frequency it’s being irradiated with.

    2. 1. No nuclear carriers were stationed at Quonset Point.
      2. Quonset Point was a Naval Air Station with carrier piers; was not a shipyard.
      3. Reactors, or the conventional power sources, do not typically provide power ‘house-keeping’ power. Electrical power to docked ships is usually shore-based.
      4. There are no reactors designated is power sources for communications systems.
      5. Tracking and weather radar, past a few hundred meters, would have enough power to cause interference only. Fire-control radars are lock out while in port.

      Not very plausible.

      1. Not to mention most all radar systems have mast blanking- meaning they don’t pulse or radiate when aimed where they might radiate someone on board the ship, especially the helm… the scan angle needed to radiate a cop car on shore would require way more “tinkering” with the radar than any shipboard navy techs would know how to do. It would more than likely require a depot level tech-rep or engineer to truly hack the radar system to do this, plus the power drops of drastically at distance. Interference at best. And maybe the cop was on X band if back in the day, meaning tracking radar on the ship. but it likely the ships radar and the cops radar wouldn’t be any where near the same frequency – i.e. K or Ka band which are 24 to 36 GHz – way above ship radar frequencies – so you’d have a huge mismatch and likely ZERO power into the cops electronics.

    1. A square waveguide would be better, also most cantenna designs online are wrong. third. the can has a lip from the can opener. So likely this is a hack not a calculated test of a design. Magnetrons are quite interesting they are free oscillating, so place a few of them in the same waveguide (properly), and they sync up all by themselves for KW of RF power. Routed through a proper feed horn and dish, moon bounce is possible with a sensitive receiver to hear the 5 second delayed 50HZ hum from your kitchen appliance, hypothetically speaking.

      1. Yah, I’m wondering how much the lip spoils it. Can diameter looks reasonable, pringles cans are too small, but that’s by eyeball not measure. The most ideal cans I’ve found for 2.4ghz are the tin presentation cans for 750ml liquor bottles. I don’t like how short this one is, seems it needs to be about a third longer.

  2. A maser of sufficient power can cause the water molecules in objects to become energetic enough to flash to steam. I have seen this, but wouldn’t characterize it as an “explosion,” really. I suppose if the beam penetrated deep enough for a sufficient period, and the structure of the object maintained the pressure, it could “explode” eventually… Realistically, it would be more “breaking apart energetically” at best, like some rocks around a hot campfire. I don’t see this being achieved with a common waveguide and a magnetron, though… the gain is just insufficient to have use a realistic transmitter for the necessary power levels.

  3. The thing is when you get up to a reasonable number of magnetrons, how do you power them. That’s a lot of watts. Unless you’ve got a few 3kv generators you’re average mains sockets and wiring are going to get rather warm.
    I’ve been working on a microwave version of tesla’s solid state one way valve. Attempting to make something akin to the dyson vortex you’d see in one of their hoovers. It should, together with a few other tweaks, make the em drive far more efficient.
    It would be good to get hold of a couple of the 1-2kw magnetrons from industrial kitchen microwaves to simplify the setup.

      1. There’s a widely circulated video on YT which shows a chap with a 90kW light bulb (iirc). I think it might even have been posted on HaD at some point. He just uses industrial power connectors straight to the meter/distribution box — but he is based in the UK where power circuits are just more manly than e.g. the US.

        1. Old UK house installations use ring circuits, so the wires to the sockets are ridiculously thick (hence the big-ass UK plugs, they have to fit a fuse in them because of that)…you can safely push well over 4kW through the wires, but the socket is not designed to do that…

        2. UK is 230v these days. Twin sockets at 13A each.
          Main fuse is usually 100A if you want to make your own dedicated spur. Else run from the cooker spur you can take advantage of the thicker cabling. The thing is 50hz so the skin effect means if you want more current you’re better off using tubing rather than cables.

          1. That got me wondering about remote induced “phosphenes.” Hhhmmm… be interesting to see someone step out and perform the microwave hearing effect, phosphene’s and other acts that would be interesting to see the EEG’s before, during and after… especially the EEG’s that are specific to the hearing and vision functions with some standardized testing. If the produceconsumerobot website guy can get into this, that would be neat.

      2. @Annie – the EU harmonised supply voltages, so we are now 230V +/- 10% iirc but we used to be 240V. Typical single phase domestic supply is 100kW @ 230v, larger supplies are installed for bigger buildings and/or those using electric heating.

  4. Collimator man! Active Denial this baby with a dish… oh wait…! :-|) I was thinking about the same in regards to the original posting. Awesome, more accurate video for the more serious minded to reproduce and verify reproducible results. Neat to see and yeah… kind of like with lasers… uuuhhhmmm… maybe don’t collimate and stick with the horn config for sure. The collimators aren’t well disclosed for a reason. I’m guessing the same with pulse modulations for frequencies that are more sensed by the human body senses and interfermetry type operations where you could theoretically heterodyne with microwaves and even perform telemetry back and forth or something like that.

      1. Seems of few years back I could easily google search and bring up results for microwave collimators and waveguides (great call on waveguides). Perceiving microwaves is another world really in regards to components also and even say traces on PCB design. The transition from electronics, amateur radio to RF “e” engineering or to RF “E” engineering. :-|)

        In regards to online easily found references… not so much now days. Is interesting the different frequency ranges and the types of materials that act as the types of different lenses. Say my work was more in the IR range. So what at first I visibly, like with microwaves or other frequencies that are lower, can’t see through… the other frequencies can pass through and can transmit through and not so much diffuse, refract, reflect, etc.. The other way around with some materials that are clearly visible to see through, the other frequencies can’t transmit through.

        Seems most frequencies the slot is the key and then some material that does the lens(es) work. That is where I’m not sure and not going into more detail for the kiddos. They seem fascinated by explanations for limitations. Feel free to share though. I don’t have the “lead” foil hat quite yet or signal inverse tracking source beams targeting me radar or even notches on my power lines and grounds for that matter :-|)

        Yes, O2 and H2O are the main absorbers if I recall correct in the atmosphere if not other particulates.

  5. Man, to think we have modulations and multiplexing of microwaves now that aren’t behind the microwave heating/cooking device shields like… all over the place.

    According to Wikipedia.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G
    “The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the spectrum for 5G, including the 28 Gigahertz, 37 GHz and 39 GHz bands, on 14 July 2016.[7][8]”

    Add synthetic aperture radar or at least phased array capabilities and 28+28+39=95GHz ow! or 28+28+37+2.4 = ~95GHz ow!

    Man, harmonics and directionality and more than just simple triangulation seems creepy theories to test for active denial capabilities, bineural heterodyning and pulse modulation hearing and other human body resonance frequencies modulation and I didn’t even get into difference frequencies capabilities with other existing systems that have lower bandwidth and oscillators that are more accurate. .

  6. Considering entrainment thresholds like the “current of injury” sweet spot ranges for the human body resonance frequencies to get the effect. “What’s the Frequency Kenneth!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWkMhCLkVOg

    The song’s title refers to an incident in New York City in 1986, when two then-unknown assailants attacked journalist Dan Rather, while repeating “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Frequency,_Kenneth%3F
    https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/what-s-the-frequency

  7. I built a HERF gun a while back and used a motorcycle battery hooked to a 1kw inverter which was then further connected to the high-voltage transformer. Even laser cut a cool shell for it and had some fun frying some old phones from a few feet away; but I think the best use I ever got out of it was when I used it to cook some spaghetti in the back of my car when I forgot to bring a camping stove…

  8. I’ve seen commercials for body sculpting that supposedly melts the fat away. Being a bit into electronics, it would be interesting to build my own device than spend thousands of dollars I don’t have. Cause the fat cells to heat and explode so
    the body can dispose of them. A device that could do that would sell like hotcakes.

      1. Figure materials absorption and transmission characteristics in the environment, boundary and internal system when selecting the band and bandwidth range of EMF used along with the method to focus like with one source or multiple sources where they overlap and minimal energy required for desired effect and safety ranges to avoid adverse impact.

        When I was younger I thought there would be more devices that are nonionizing frequency range on the market using more emission sources instead of the ionizing devices that are most typical with cancer radiation treatment especially.

        Strange is cancer didn’t run in the family and with the EMF crap hacking away with sonic assaults and more… huh… the cancer assumed manifests and the sanctioned radiation ultimately killed my father.

          1. On some days does seem that way. I even read through what I write after the post comment button has been clicked and am thinking an edit option would be great to have. Thoughts are what I write. That is all. Looks like the first two sentences relate in regards to a topic where you can use your imagination.

            The last sentence is more regarding forensically clean murdering in a hospital setting which could also be interpreted as assisted suicide both of which are criminal and illegal in the U.S. Jurisdiction and the State of Michigan and most States though condoned in society. The radiation procedures are illegal due to the lack of substantiation of the system being valid and really even validations of the protocols for the operating procedures for the target internal systems variables to meet a specification which is not substantiated or even exists. Basically, if you have certain licenses, you can make “educated guesses” regarding some other persons life, treat how you want or “feel” emotionally and not logically and not be held liable criminally or civilly unless someone actually performs their job validly of which many do not. .

      1. Body “sculpting” works. I’m not familiar with the “fat burning treatments” EMF penetrating through the skin though without having some sort of penetrating wound. There is a wiki on non-surgical liposuction. The non-surgical liposuction is new to me and thanks for sharing. May be an area of opportunity. Amazing what can be marketed for no required reason for survival and make people rich. If you are not familiar with other methods of body sculpting, do some searches on the web and even wikipedia alone regarding the following topics I am more familiar with: lithotrupsy, Laser ablation, laser assisted lipsuction, Skin Classic, electrology, hair removal, diathermy, electrosurgery, electrocautery, hyfrecator, harmonic scalpel, dielectric heating, diathermy, and galvanic skin treatment.

  9. I’ve seen full sized fluorescent light bulbs lit up and 10′ or more and hot dogs cooked on poles in front of 1.5KW microwave transmitters. But that used a 38dB gain, 8′ parabolic dish and a significant generator to supply power it.

  10. As someone who knows more than your average bear about microwave tubes – perhaps $>gainfully<$ knows more than the average bear. I am never disappointed in how dumb people are when it comes to this stuff.

    Perhaps the maggies were all tuned to the exact same frequency by the caring hands that mass produce these things for home cooking by the thousands, and three perfectly tuned ones magically ended up in this guys junk bin and they all locked onto each other to add up in phase in a meaningful way (yeah, that can happen when the stars and planets and frequencies align) – you still get 3kW… coupled to the world by a tin can… And is that tin can the exact right size to be an effective resonator? One that won't backward oscillate and kill the maggies?

    But lets be generous and say 3kW… at 2.4GHz, which just happens to be perfect for heating water – and atmospheric attenuation ( and why your 2.4 Ghz wifi range sucks). He's doing things at the same distance away from the Maggie that you can do in your own microwave the same way you cook your food at 1kW…. resonant chambers, stirrers, all the things that make the ovens work…

    Now go out on the web and look at the military version of this and the size of the dish antenna and think orders of magnitude more power dumped into that antenna (probably pulsed too, for more peak power) and they are only causing a little discomfort to walking bags of water….
    Not even destroying electronics, no because that takes impulses of HUNDREDS OF MEGAWATTS at the right frequencies focused via high directional antennas at relatively close range to pull off…

    Or you could take control of the ionosphere and use very low frequencies to tinker with thousands of miles of low band antennas – AKA high tension wires… But you'll need either the sun to cooperate with you or launch codes for that.

    It doesn't take a stretch to imagine that the original video is a hoax, because that is exactly what it was…. And this guy is just ruining perfectly good microwave ovens and making them perform worse!

    And from the script bot above babbling away – RF lenses are a thing. Just look at any police radar antenna up close. you'll find an acrylic or Teflon lens – the dielectric constant of those materials cause them to behave just like optical lenses at RF frequencies….

    1. Yeah, you’re babbling too. No doubt the original video is a hoax. Why the bs? Nice try looking like you’re valuable to society promoting rational thought or made someone actually worth something with a return on investment for the long term perpetuity of society… where-ever the society is you exist in.

      Launch codes??? Yeah… doubt that genius.

      Sure, you have to do some math and know the properties of materials based on the frequency used for… though who has a website that has laid out in detail all the different forms of lenses from DC to above cosmic radiation? None fool! Refer a book to me also that regards the range of RF lens materials for the whole range of RF and types of lenses on the market since you know all and are so valuable gainfully compared to the average bear. Oh, great wise one… please prove yourself.

  11. Wow… that’s a lot of interest.

    Believe it’s mistaken to direct discussion at attempts to jam or disable because these involve handcuffs, a record, and fines when it is perfectly legal to use passive methods to just make yourself the size of a humminbird instead of a battleship. Some vehicles it’s easy like a motorcycle…. if you know how.

    1. Wow, he’s up to over a half a million views and Kreosan has 3.6 million views. No wonder the moderator didn’t allow my last posts. Stick with the horn model. :-)

      Who’s jamming or disabling other than with the devices Moscow, Cuban and Uzbekistan Embassy assault with intent to maim style and other cohorts acting like the criminals can’t focus a beam and use a brief pulse that is high duty cycle sympathetic resonating to the targeted device or individual? Self defense up to lethal force is allowed when the offender is in the commission of a crime that is victimizing someone.

      Are you referring to ferro-organic, high permeability and absorption materials or angular reflection design materials? Where did that come from?

Leave a Reply to eccentricelectronCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.