We present the development and application of a compact pulsed positron beam at the Ghent University. The pulsing system of this source-based hewn consists of a chopper-prebuncher and a resonator buncher both running at a repetition rate of 50 MHz(20 ns time window). A description of the timing components is given. The energy of the positrons can be adjusted between 0.5 and 30 keV by changing the potential of the sample. Finally, we propose a refined method to analyse lifetime spectra from pulsed positron beams using a resolution function with the shape of the time structure of the beam. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.