Direction Finders 51

Contents Overview Chapter Overview Type Index R&S Addresses

12 Introduction into Theory of Direction Finding

This method is a special form of a beam- With the development of digital signal pro- 4.2 Basic design
forming algorithm [11], which is described cessing new approaches have now A typical hardware configuration of a DSP-
in detail in the following section on direc- become possible: based direction finder is shown below.
tion finding using sensor array processing.
◆ With high-speed signal The outputs of the individual antenna ele-
12 processing chips being ments are usually taken first to a network
56
available, the require- which contains for instance
87
Measured ment for a simple and fre-
22 phase differences quency-independent rela- ◆ test signal inputs and
05
tionship between the ◆ multiplexers if the number N of
antenna signals and the antenna outputs to be measured is
12
56 Calculated phase
bearing no longer applies. greater than the number H of the
87 differences for different Even highly complex receiver sections (tuner and A/D con-
22
directions of arrival of mathematical relation- verter).
a plane wave
05 ships can be evaluated in
α
a reasonably short time The signals are then converted to an inter-
for determining the bear- mediate frequency that is appropriate for
K( α ) ing or handled fast and the selected sampling rate of the A/D con-
economically with the aid verter and digitized. To reduce the volume
of search routines of data, the digital data are down-con-
verted into the baseband. The complex
α samples of the baseband signal xi(t) (i=1,
Fig. 17: Principle of correlation evaluation ◆ Numeric methods allow the separation 2, ... N) are filtered for the desired evalua-
of several waves arriving from different tion bandwidth and applied to the bearing
directions even with limited antenna evaluation section.
apertures (high-resolution method,
4 Direction finding using super resolution, multiwave resolu-
sensor array processing tion)
Analog
4.1 General ... signal processing
The development of the classical DF meth-
ods was aimed at designing antenna con-
Antenna network
figurations and circuits that allowed bear-
ing determinations to be as simple as pos- Test
Tuner Tuner ... Tuner generator
sible. It was important to establish a sim-
ple mathematical relationship between IF IF IF
Synthesizer
the antenna signals and the direction of ...
A/D A/D A/D
wave incidence largely independent of fre- converter converter converter
quency, polarization and environment.
...
Down- Down- Digital
converter converter signal processing

Down -
Fig. 18: Typical con- Converter
figuration of a DSP-
based direction Filtering and bearing calculation
finder

Contents Overview Chapter Overview Type Index R&S Addresses

Direction Finders 52
Contents Overview Chapter Overview Type Index R&S Addresses

Introduction into Theory of Direction Finding

4.3 Beamforming methods1 ) Fig. 21 shows the response of a linear array weighting factors can in the most cases
If analogously to the conventional antenna with five elements spaced 0.45λ apart to directly be calculated from the array geom-
arrays the element signals xi are multiplied the variation of the direction with a wave etry.
by complex weighting factors wi and arriving at an angle of 60°.
added (Fig. 19), a sum signal is obtained If multiport antennas are used (Fig. 22, see
which according to the resulting direc- next page), the port voltages ui
1
tional characteristic depends on the direc- are as a rule measured as a func-
0.9
tion of wave incidence. tion of the wave angle. The
0.8
weighting is then defined by
0.7
Antenna element ∗
Directional characteristic

0.6 ui (α) ∗
1 ... N wi ( α ) = = xi ( α )
0.5 u0 ( α )
0.4

0.3 where u0 is a suitable reference

x 1 ... x N
0.2 voltage and (.)* means complex
w1 w
N 0.1 conjugate. Since beamforming
using general multiport antennas
Fig. 19: Beam- 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400
forming by alpha/grad often does not produce a distinct
weighting the Σ directivity of the (synthetic) antenna
outputs of an y Fig. 21: Response of linear 5-element array to variation of
direction (elements have cardioid directional characteristic)
diagram, the terms
antenna array
Output

The response of the output signal y to the Measurement and ◆ correlation method and
storage of
change in the weighting factors wi cannot element signals ◆ vector matching
be used for direction finding the same as x
with the classic rotating or goniometer are used in this case too.
Multiplication by
direction finder. The difference is that with weighting factors w Weighting factors
numeric beamforming the DF speed is only and addition for all for all directions This is explained by the following: if the N
directions
limited by the computing speed. measured complex antenna voltages are
y
considered to be the coordinates of a vec-
With conventional beamforming algo- Calculation of tor in an N-dimensional space (measure-
output power yy*
rithms the phases of the weighting factors ment vector) and the N weighting factors
are chosen so that the weighted element the components of the weighting factor in
Searching for
signals are added in phase and thus yield maximum the same space, beamforming is equiva-
output power
a maximum sum signal if the wave arrives as a function of
lent to the forming of a scalar product
from the given direction αr. direction between these two vectors. If a normaliza-
Fig. 20: Process of tion to the absolute values is made, the
Fig. 20 shows the sequence of the direc- direction finding scalar product corresponds to the direction
Direction for
maximum power using conventional
tion finding process. beamformer cosine between the two vectors. The direc-
= bearing
tion cosine reaches its maximum if the
directions agree (the vectors are matched);
the Euclidean distance reaches its mini-
1) The beamforming, correlation and Fourier methods
If antenna arrays with largely the same mum.
are equivalent in their system theory: they all use
generalized FIR filters with wave incidence angles elements and an array geometry describ-
as "spatial frequencies". able by analytical means are used, the

Contents Overview Chapter Overview Type Index R&S Addresses

 Direction Finders
Contents Overview
12 Introduction into Theory of Direction Finding
Port i
ui
Port 0
u1
Port 2
Port 1
Fig. 22: General multiport antenna with application example
The direction cosine between two N-
dimensional vectors corresponds to the
correlation between two data sets with N
elements. The distance square corre-
sponds to the mean square error between
two data sets to be matched.
4.4 High-resolution DF methods (super
resolution)
If in the frequency channel of interest
unwanted waves are received in addition
to the wanted wave, conventional beam-
forming may lead to bearing errors as a
function of the antenna geometry. There
are two approaches to solve this problem:
◆ If the power of the interference wave
component is smaller than that of the
wanted wave component, the direction
finder can be designed to minimize the
bearing errors especially by choosing a
sufficiently wide antenna aperture (see
5.1)
◆ If the interference wave component is
greater or equal to the wanted wave
component, the interference waves
too have to be determined in order to
be able to eliminate them. When using
conventional beamforming algorithms,
this means that the secondary maxima
in the DF function have to be evaluated
too. The limits are reached
Contents Overview
Chapter Overview Type Index
Port 2 Port 3
Port 0
Port 1
– if the ratio between primary maxi-
mum and secondary maxima of the
directional characteristic becomes
too small or
– the angle difference between
wanted wave and interference
wave is smaller than the width of
the main lobe
By optimizing the weighting factors, the
level of the secondary maxima can be
reduced but at the same time the width of
the primary maximum is
increased. The aim of the Antenna element
super-resolution (SR) DF 1 ... N 90
method is to resolve this prob-
lem.
x 1 ... x N
1
w N
Minimum-signal direction find-
ers are the "grandfathers" of
the SR direction finders. In the
Σ 270
early days of direction finding, y
the bearing of co-channel sig-
nals was taken by alternately suppressing
the waves involved with the aid of a rotat-
ing loop. It is noteworthy that signals are
separated by the acoustic monitoring of
the modulation. To determine the loop null
a correlation process with acoustic pat-
terns is therefore required.
Chapter Overview Type Index
53
R&S Addresses
Adaptive antennas are antenna arrays
with beamformers allowing automatic
spatial suppression of interference waves
[13], [14], [15]. In communication systems,
optimization of the signal-to-noise ratio is
the primary aim; in radio direction finding
the weighting determined for signal sup-
pression is used to determine the direc-
tions of wave incidence.
To this end the weighting of the beam-
former is selected so that under certain
auxiliary conditions the output power is
minimized. In the case of the Capon beam-
former [22] the auxiliary condition for set-
ting the weighting is defined with the
antenna gain remaining constant for a
given direction αr. If the incident waves
are uncorrelated, the beamformer is
adjusted for nulls to occur in all signal
directions except for the direction αr
(Fig. 23).
1
120 60
0.8
0.6
150 30
0.4
0.2
w 180 0
210 330
240 300
Fig. 23: High-resolution direction finding
through nulling
If the direction of an incident wave coin-
cides with the given direction αr, there is a
distinct maximum in the output power.
Fig. 24 shows an example of the angular
spectrum of a Capon beamformer with a 9-
element circular array (D/λ=1.4) and five
uncorrelated waves [23].
R&S Addresses
Direction Finders 54
Contents Overview Chapter Overview Type Index R&S Addresses

Introduction into Theory of Direction Finding

Capon beamformer MUSIC

10 350

300
0
250
10*log(Pac),10*log(Pkonv)

10*log(Pmu),10*log(Pkonv) /dB
-10
200

-20 150

100
-30
50

-40
0

-50 -50
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400
alpha/grad alpha/grad

Fig. 24: DF function of Capon beamformers compared to conventional Fig. 26: DF function when using MUSIC algorithm (S/N=10)
beamformer (S/N=100); wave angle: 5°, 15°, 40°, 60°, 220°

Similar to a minimum-signal direction of signals that are independent of the ◆ Numeric DF value
finder, the resolution strongly depends on noise level [16], [17], [24]. The reciprocal ◆ Azimuth in polar coordinates
the signal-to-noise ratio. Fig. 25 shows the value is usually used as the DF function so ◆ Elevation as bargraph or polar diagram
same receiving scenario with noise that distinct peaks occur in the signal (combined with azimuth display)
increased by a factor of 10. The resolution directions (Fig. 26). ◆ DF quality
of waves arriving at an angle of 5°and 10° ◆ Level
is no longer possible. ◆ Histogram of DF values
◆ DF values versus time (waterfall)
Capon beamformer
5
Fig. 27 shows a choice of possible displays.
0

1 2 3 4
-5
10*log(Pac),10*log(Pkonv)

-10

-15

-20

Fig. 25: DF function of Capon

-25
beamformer compared to con-
-30 ventional beamformer (S/N=10)
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400
alpha/grad

The subspace methods are aimed at 5 Display of bearings

eliminating the effect of noise. This can be
done by splitting up the N-dimensional The display of the DF results is of great
space spanned by the element outputs importance as an interface to the opera-
into subspaces. The well-known MUSIC tor. Basically, distinction is to be made 5 6 6 7

algorithm (Multiple Signal Classification) whether the display is the DF result of a

Fig. 27: Display of DF values with single-chan-
uses the fact that the signals lie perpendic- single channel or of a multichannel direc- nel direction finding
ular to the noise subspace. If the direction tion finder. In a single-channel display, 1 = Averaging mode 5 = Level
vectors are now projected to the noise sub- the following parameters are usually indi- 2 = DF quality 6 = Azimuth
space, nulls are obtained in the presence cated: 3 = Output mode 7 = Elevation
4 = Averaging time

Contents Overview Chapter Overview Type Index R&S Addresses