Generalization of a phased array error correction method

The failure of a single element can seriously degrade the sidelobe pattern of a high performance array and therefore methods to compensate array element failures are required. One recent method considers an N-element array with P plane wave signals incident from known directions /spl thetav/ /sub p/, and processes the received signals from a select set of P contiguous operative array elements. The processing corresponds to that of a P/spl times/P multibeam network which spatially separates the incident signals. Any missing element signal is then reconstructed as a weighted sum of these P separated signals. The method works perfectly for signals from known directions but can lead to spurious responses for other signals. These errors are small when only a few incident signals are reconstructed, but can grow very large with the reconstruction of many, closely spaced known signals, such as required to model a wide clutter region for instance. We generalize the approach to utilize all operative elements in the array and thereby reduce these spurious responses.