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The U.S. military likes technology developed by a Tucson company to destroy improvised roadside bombs, but it wants a different vehicle to carry the system, Tucson-based Ionatron Inc. said Wednesday as it reported earnings.

The news dimmed investor hopes that a major production contract is near for Ionatron, which reported a first-quarter loss after the close of trading Wednesday.

The company also said it has signed an agreement with a New Jersey defense-electronics company to work jointly on directed-energy weapons systems.

Ionatron said Wednesday that it had completed a preproduction contract with the U.S. military to demonstrate a remote-control vehicle designed to disable or destroy improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

Ionatron's Joint IED Neutralizer, called JIN, is a four-wheeled remote-control vehicle that the company says uses a powerful pulse of electrical energy to destroy IEDs.

The JIN is an offshoot of Ionatron's core technology for laser-guided directed-energy systems, known as Laser Induced Plasma Channel.

The company supplied 12 JINs to the military for testing, including "in-theater" testing overseas in the past year.

"The U.S. government customer concluded that the JIN counter-IED technology performed well and offers great promise, but determined that the current vehicle platform should be changed," the company said in a statement.

Ionatron CEO Thomas Dearmin, in a conference call with financial analysts, expressed some disappointment that the company did not receive a production contract after months of testing of the JIN system.

"We expected to be in production at this point in time," Dearmin told analysts. "All I can say is, it's more complicated than you or I thought it could be."

Dearmin said the vehicles used as platforms for the JIN test units were by necessity off-the-shelf because of the time constraints involved. Ionatron said it produced the 12 test JIN units in nine months.

Ionatron will work to adapt the system to other vehicles, possibly including existing military vehicles, he said.

"There needs to be parts and spares available, and it's a big system," Dearmin said. "We've engineered to put these on other platforms — I think there are other platforms out there that the military is comfortable with."

He declined to offer further details, citing a Department of Defense mandate that information on anti-IED technology be kept secret.

Ionatron posted a first-quarter net loss of $3.7 million, or 5 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $1.6 million, or 2 cents, in the same period a year ago.

Revenue for the first quarter of 2006 was $5.1 million, compared with $2.6 million for the same period last year.

The increase came from work on existing contracts with government agencies, revenue from the JIN system pre-production contract and revenue from a new contract awarded in January.