Optimized estimation of the Direction of Arrival with single tripole antenna

This paper presents an estimation of the Direction of Arrival (DOA) for a low-frequency antenna. The Matrix Pencil (MP) method combined with the Least Square Method (LSM), which has been previously applied to the DOA estimate, is improved to determine DOA for a single tripole antenna. The improvement is based on defining a new singular value factor with all the tri-channel singular values and summing the tri-channel phased signals together in order to get one signal with the optimized pattern. The proposed algorithm reduces the computational complexity and memory requirements which are highly important for spaceborne applications. The simulation results also show that the methods presented increase significantly the accuracy of DOA with more incident waves under low signal to noise ratio (SNR), and can be used for estimates of the DOA for incident waves on the Moon surface.