Array design and phase interferometer-based DOA estimation for diversely polarized antenna arrays

Rapidly acquiring the unambiguous Direction of Arrival (DOA) and polarization parameters of electromagnetic waves is a significant challenge in passive direction-finding systems. To this end, the array design method and unambiguous phase interferometer-based DOA estimation method for diversely polarized antenna arrays are proposed in this paper. First, the design of antenna polarization utilizes the polarization distance and the volume of a hyper-parallel polyhedron spanned by the receiving antenna polarization orientations. Then, the array element positions are designed according to the rule of the maximum admissible phase error and DOA estimation accuracy. Subsequently, we leverage the received signal power from different antennas to resolve ambiguities and improve robustness in low SNRs. Finally, Numerical simulations indicate that the proposed method has an unambiguous probability of more than 98 % at 0 dB in the frequency range from 0.8 GHz to 18 GHz. Practical experiments further validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.