Direction-of-arrival estimation for arbitrary array configurations in ultra-wideband

In this paper, in order to solve the problem that antennas and sensors of different guidance mode used less space of the antenna plate aperture in the multi-mode composite guidance (MCG) passive radar seeker (PRS),a new algorithm for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation for arbitrary array configurations is proposed. Unlike most of the work available in the open literature, the antennas are placed in the same plane, we consider the case which may be disposed on a conformal surface, may have unknown (but fixed) geometries. The proposed estimator is computed using four antennas as a solution, the azimuth and elevation are estimated by the matrix inversion. The simulation result verifies the effectiveness in direction finding performance of this method by comparing the arbitrary-dimensional baseline algorithm, which is based on 3-D array with 2-D array. The solving ambiguous probability(SAP) from 1 GHz to 15 GHz of the conformal antenna mounted on anti-radar missile (ARM) is greater than 75%, and the direction finding error is less than 0.16°. The test based on actual direction finding system in the proposed algorithm proved that it can get well performance in real-world.