Automatic antenna pattern estimation for high-frequency surface wave radars

Abstract

Distortions of antenna patterns may cause big errors in direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for high-frequency surface wave radars using loop antennas and thus should be calibrated in the direction finding process. The conventional methods to acquire the actual patterns are to measure it, by either a transponder or a monotone beacon borne on a ship moving through all the look angles, leading to increased system complexity and cost. To address this, a novel method for automatic antenna pattern estimation is proposed, which is only involved with some soft computations, i.e. recursively approaching the actual patterns by the amplitude and direction parameter pairs extracted from the single-DOA sea echoes. Both simulations and real radar data processing results show the validity of the proposed method.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 60901073, and partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China under Grant SBK201240419.