Direction-of-arrival estimation method based on six-port technology
A new direction-of-arrival estimation method based on six-port technology is presented. In order to obtain the beam direction, the proposed circuit uses a two-channel multi-band receiver and analogue signal processing of the six-port circuit output signals. A practical approach for estimating the beam direction has also been proposed. This approach, based on the detection of the minimum magnitude of the in-quadrature output signal, avoids the necessity of computing the angle-of-arrival value. A dual-band prototype circuit was designed and fabricated. Simulation results in the S and C frequency bands are presented and discussed. In order to validate this method, measurements were carried out in the C-band. These results show a maximal angle-of-arrival estimation error of about 3%. Therefore, low-cost direction-of-arrival measurements can be performed using this new method.
