US Navy Microwave Protective Clothing

May 252007

This conductive mesh suit was developed to protect people who need to work in strong RF fields emitted by Naval shipboard RADAR systems. It provides a minimum of 20dB of attenuation from 200 MHz to 10 GHz, in fields up to 200 mW/cm². A complete set also includes rubber boots and gloves, a hardhat, and cotton over-clothes which prevent arcing between electrical equipment and the conductive mesh suit.

When my friend Hank Brown W6DJX saw this suit in my display at the 2007 MRCG meeting, he was reminded of an old poem:

The radar man with a micro-mind
If you should see upon the street
A man equipped with dipole feet
With a family of curves trailing behind
He's a radar man with a micro-mind
His eyes take on a neon gleam
His ears extend to a Yagi beam
His mouth becames another pulse gate
His heart pumps blood at a video rate
With micro-seconds and micro-waves
And micro-volts he fills his days
And thereby in the curse of time
He developed a micro-mind
This Radar man with the passing years
Attained infinite impedance between his ears
And finally succumbed to an heavy jolt
When he got what he thought was a micro-volt
The Doc looked up from his micro-scope
Turned to his collegues and softly spoke
No trace of a brain can I find
He's a Radar man with a micro mind

Here’s the Navy technical manual for this suit. It’s an 18 meg PDF file:

navships0967-316-3010.pdf