A rapid code acquisition method for calibrating space-borne phase array antennas

Online calibration of phased array antennas has attracted much attention due to the wide implementation of space-borne beam forming in telemetry and communication. In order to reduce the time consumption of calibration, a rapid acquisition method based on iterative message passing algorithm (iMPA) for code-divided calibration scheme is proposed. We transform the pseudo noise sequence into sparse graphical models, then apply the iMPA over these graphs to obtain the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can save the average acquisition time about 10 times and suffer only 1dB performance loss in comparison with the conventional method such as the hybrid search. Moreover, this approach is suitable for real-time online calibration of largescale space-borne phased array antennas due to the low storage requirements of calibrating signals and the time consumption of calibration.