Even with local power storage the grid demand would be noteworthy and you&#x27;d notice some impressive power lines going into the desert just to keep up with average demand.<p>Even if 99% of the transmitted signal were absorbed, the reflected signal would be staggering, strongest signal you&#x27;d detect on the ground, probably.  The world has a couple radio fences at Graves and some NAVSPASUR sites which broadcast (well) under a megawatt continuous and are pretty trivial to detect when a satellite blows thru the fan shaped beam.  Then again, who&#x27;s listening on (obscure microwave ISM frequency) for 10 minutes at 2am one night.  Possibly no one would notice.  The existing fences are well within the ability of serious ham radio operators to use for meteor scatter predictions and stuff like that.  Supposedly when the fences hit the moon its quite a bloop of signal, so I&#x27;ve heard.<p>As a side note its funny to try and estimate the total wattage of millimeter wave magnetrons and solid state power amps manufactured to date by humanity and compare to the plan, its depressing.  Lets say someone with a three letter agency outright bought the entire production line at triquint... Even optimistically how many millenia would it take to produce the GW required?  Hmm...  In this way the idea is very manhattan project like in that the hard part isn&#x27;t deciding to do it or even getting the cash, but building the infrastructure to build the infrastructure two maybe three layers down to finally build the actual device.  You would notice if &quot;they&quot; did this at area 51 because of the world wide shortage in foundry capacity followed by a staggering production glut.  The world wide famine of stuff you need to build the stuff you need to build the foundry to make the amplifiers would be noticed.  OK so the entire world supply of machines to build positioners that are used in foundaries has disappeared from the market, interesting.<p>Something everyone is very careful not to discuss is a very small scale like a hypersonic anti-missile missile for a naval ship is &quot;reasonable-ish&quot; or less unreasonable anyway.  Rather than talking about mach 25 orbits of tons, or building naval ships to carry dozens of mach 5 self propelled interceptor missiles, why not build naval ships that carry hundreds, even thousands, of microwave boosted mach 5 interceptors?<p>And speaking of death beams, strategic scale will be hard to build, but something that can near vaporize an incoming sea skimming cruise missile guidance electronics is much more scalable &#x2F; reasonable.  I would imagine Somali style boarders would find the RF to be unpleasant.  So the emitter array will be dual purpose.<p>So I suspect there&#x27;s something like this system installed and operating at a very small cheap scale at some naval research facility right now.  Area 51 was all about the air force.<p>Now if I disappear after posting this, we&#x27;ll know I was at least partially correct...