Phase characterization of a 2-path on-site coding digital beamformer

Recently, a novel receiver architecture with on-site coding was proposed to reduce the number of analog-to-digital converters behind antenna array elements. To realize digital beamforming using this receiver, it is important to faithfully recover the phase difference between adjacent signal paths at the digital baseband. In this paper, the impact of on-site coding on the phase error is examined for a 2-path receiver. Simulations showed that the relative phase difference between signal paths can be recovered at the digital baseband and that any phase error is due to the channel noise.