A new method for blowing up the power of a singular cardinal is presented. It allows to blow up the power of a singular in the core model cardinal of uncountable cofinality. The method makes use of overlapping extenders.

Supercompact extender based forcings are used to construct models with HOD cardinal structure different from those of V. In particular, a model where all regular uncountable cardinals are measurable in HOD is constructed.

We analyze the modified extender based forcing from Assaf Sharon’s PhD thesis. We show there is a bad scale in the extension and therefore weak square fails. We also present two metatheorems which give a rough characterization of when a diagonal Prikry-type forcing forces the failure of weak square.

We give an application of the extender based Radin forcing to cardinal arithmetic. Assuming κ is a large enough cardinal we construct a model satisfying 2κ = κ+n together with 2λ = λ+n for each cardinal λ < κ, where 0 < n < ω. The cofinality of κ can be set arbitrarily or κ can remain inaccessible.

When κ remains an inaccessible, Vκ is a model of ZFC satisfying 2λ = λ+n for all cardinals λ.