Research on onboard amplitude and phase measurement for Phased Array Antenna calibration

The precise beam pointing of Phased Array Antenna needs high consistency of each array channel. In the actual Phased Array Antenna system, the amplitude and phase of every array channel cannot be completely consistent; therefore, it needs real-time monitoring and array channel amplitude/phase error adjusting. This paper proposes an onboard method to measure the amplitude /phase error of every array channel with high-precision, which is based on the software phase-locked loop. The simulation and experiment results show that the algorithm is not only simple and practical, but also with high measurement accuracy.