Single channel all digital direction finding system

Direction finding system can be utilized in radar, in sonar in order to find the Direction Of Arrival (DOA) of signal of interest for the purpose of positioning sources. Conventional direction finding system employs multi-antenna elements or by single switched antenna followed by digital or analogue receivers and a digital signal processing block. We propose in this paper, a robust single channel direction finding system devoted to radar or sonar. The proposed solution is based on a switched antenna associated to a special all digital receiver architecture that allows us to digitalize directly RF signals with low sampling frequency. The proposed system takes advantages of single antenna element instead of multiple antenna ones, of all digital receivers in terms of digital signal processing and of low-cost of implementation thanks to its low sampling frequency. The novel architecture is modelled and simulated for the test of its performance through the DOA estimate of signal of interest by employing a super-resolution algorithm.