The LWA1 Radio Telescope

LWA1 is a new radio telescope operating in the frequency range 10-88 MHz, located in central New Mexico. The telescope consists of 258 pairs of dipole-type antennas whose outputs are individually digitized and formed into beams. Simultaneously, signals from all dipoles can be recorded using one of the instrument's "all dipoles" modes, facilitating all-sky imaging. Notable features of the instrument include high intrinsic sensitivity (about 6 kJy zenith system equivalent flux density), large instantaneous bandwidth (up to 78 MHz), and 4 independently-steerable beams utilizing digital "true time delay" beamforming. This paper summarizes the design of LWA1 and its performance as determined in commissioning experiments. We describe the method currently in use for array calibration, and report on measurements of sensitivity and beamwidth.Comment: 9 pages, 14 figures, accepted by IEEE Trans. Antennas & Propagation. Various minor changes from previous versio

Enhanced Direction of Arrival Estimation through Electromagnetic Modeling

Engineering is a high art that balances modeling the physical world and designing meaningful solutions based on those models. Array signal processing is no exception, and many innovative and creative solutions have come from the field of array processing. However, many of the innovative algorithms that permeate the field are based on a very simple signal model of an array. This simple, although powerful, model is at times a pale reflection of the complexities inherent in the physical world, and this model mismatch opens the door to the performance degradation of any solution for which the model underpins. This dissertation seeks to explore the impact of model mismatch upon common array processing algorithms. To that end, this dissertation brings together the disparate topics of electromagnetics and signal processing. Electromagnetics brings a singular focus on the physical interactions of electromagnetic waves and physical array structures, while signal processing brings modern computational power to solve difficult problems. We delve into model mismatch in two ways; first, by developing a blind array calibration routine that estimates model mismatch and incorporates that knowledge into the reiterative superresoluiton (RISR) direction of arrival estimation algorithm; second, by examining model mismatch between a transmitting and receiving array, and assessing the impact of this mismatch on prolific direction of arrival estimation algorithms. In both of these studies we show that engineers have traded algorithm performance for model simplicity, and that if we are willing to deal with the added complexity we can recapture that lost performance

Mutual Coupling in Phased Arrays: A Review

The mutual coupling between antenna elements affects the antenna parameters like terminal impedances, reflection coefficients and hence the antenna array performance in terms of radiation characteristics, output signal-to-interference noise ratio (SINR), and radar cross section (RCS). This coupling effect is also known to directly or indirectly influence the steady state and transient response, the resolution capability, interference rejection, and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation competence of the array. Researchers have proposed several techniques and designs for optimal performance of phased array in a given signal environment, counteracting the coupling effect. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the methods that model and mitigate the mutual coupling effect for different types of arrays. The parameters that get affected due to the presence of coupling thereby degrading the array performance are discussed. The techniques for optimization of the antenna characteristics in the presence of coupling are also included

Non-Radiative Calibration of Active Antenna Arrays

Antenna arrays offer significant benefits for modern wireless communication systems but they remain difficult and expensive to produce. One of the impediments of utilising them is to maintain knowledge of the precise amplitude and phase relationships between the elements of the array, which are sensitive to errors particularly when each element of the array is connected to its own transceiver. These errors arise from multiple sources such as manufacturing errors, mutual coupling between the elements, thermal effects, component aging and element location errors. The calibration problem of antenna arrays is primarily the identification of the amplitude and phase mismatch, and then using this information for correction. This thesis will present a novel measurement-based calibration approach, which uses a fixed structure allowing each element of the array to be measured. The measurement structure is based around multiple sensors, which are interleaved with the elements of the array to provide a scalable structure that provides multiple measurement paths to almost all of the elements of the array. This structure is utilised by comparison based calibration algorithms, so that each element of the array can be calibrated while mitigating the impact of the additional measurement hardware on the calibration accuracy. The calibration was proven in the investigation of the experimental test-bed, which represented a typical telecommunications basestation. Calibration accuracies of ±0.5dB and 5o were achieved for all but one amplitude outlier of 0.55dB. The performance is only limited by the quality of the coupler design. This calibration approach has also been demonstrated for wideband signal calibration

DOA estimation and tracking of ULAs with mutual coupling

A class of subspace-based methods for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation and tracking in the case of uniform linear arrays (ULAs) with mutual coupling is proposed. By treating the angularly-independent mutual coupling as angularly-dependent complex array gains, the middle subarray is found to have the same complex array gains. Using this property, a new way for parameterizing the steering vector is proposed and the corresponding method for joint estimation of DOAs and mutual coupling matrix (MCM) using the whole array data is derived based on subspace principle. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has a better performance than the conventional subarray-based method especially for weak signals. Furthermore, to achieve low computational complexity for online and time-varying DOA estimation, three subspace tracking algorithms with different arithmetic complexities and tracking abilities are developed. More precisely, by introducing a better estimate of the subspace to the conventional tracking algorithms, two modified methods, namely modified projection approximate subspace tracking (PAST) (MPAST) and modified orthonormal PAST (MOPAST), are developed for slowly changing subspace, whereas a Kalman filter with a variable number of measurements (KFVM) method for rapidly changing subspace is introduced. Simulation results demonstrate that these algorithms offer high flexibility and effectiveness for tracking DOAs in the presence of mutual coupling. © 2006 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Antenna array calibration in wireless communications

Imperial Users onl

Beamforming and time reversal imaging for near-field electromagnetic localisation using planar antenna arrays

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The localisation of radiating sources of electromagnetic waves in the near-field of a receiver antenna array are of use in a vast range of applications, such as in microwave imaging, wireless communications, RFID, real time localisation systems and remote sensing etc. Localisation of targets embedded in a background dielectric medium, which is usually the case in Radar, UWB imaging and remote sensing, can be done using the scattered response received at the antennas. In this thesis, we investigate methods for localisation of both near-field radiating as well as scattering sources of electromagnetic waves. For localisation of near-field radiating sources, planar antenna arrays such as concentric circular ring array (CCRA), uniform rectangular array (URA), uniform circular array (UCA) and elliptic array are employed. The thesis employs beamforming and parameter estimation methods for localisation and proposes novel algorithms that are based on standard Capon beamformer (SCB), subspace based superresolution algorithms (MUSIC and ESPRIT) and maximum likelihood (ML) methods. Complex array geometries can suffer from severe mutual coupling and are susceptible to array modelling errors. These errors impair the performance of algorithms that are used for beamforming and parameter estimation for localisation. To overcome the limitations of standard Capon beamformer (SCB), a modified capon beamforming method is proposed to make SCB robust against both array modelling error and mutual coupling effects. The proposed method is applied with planar antenna arrays for localisation of near-field sources. Planar arrays are also used with MUSIC and ESPRIT superreso lution algorithms for performance investigation in a near-field source localisation. Here, to reduce the computational burden of standard MUSIC and ESPRIT algorithms, a novel method to estimate the range using the time-delay is proposed. Lastly, to overcome the performance limitations of superresolution algorithms with planar arrays, the ML estimation is investigated for the localisation of near-field sources using planar arrays. Since ML method cannot automatically detect the number of sources, a novel method is proposed here for detecting the number of sources. Finally, performance comparisons of all the methods under investigation have been presented using computer simulations. In order to localise targets embedded either in homogeneous or in heterogeneous background medium, we employ time reversal (TR) techniques that localise based on the received scattering responses from the embedded targets. We propose a novel beamspace- TR technique that can achieve efficient focusing on targets embedded in both a homogeneous and heterogeneous dielectric background media. It is shown that prior to back propagation, applying beamspace processing to the TR operation in the receiving mode helps achieve a reduced dimensional computation and achieves selective focusing. We have also proposed beamspace-TR-MUSIC algorithm for improving the resolution of standard TR-MUSIC algorithm. Performance of these techniques is investigated for localising the target embedded in a clutter rich dielectric background where the dielectric contrast between the target and the background medium is very low. We also propose to extend the maximum likelihood based TR (TR-ML) to improve the focusing ability and to help to localise dielectric targets embedded in a highly cluttered dielectric medium. To prove the ability of the proposed algorithms, they are applied to the problem of UWB radar imaging for the detection of early stage breast cancer. Computer simulations are used for the investigation of the imaging performance of TR, beamspace-TR, TR-MUSIC, beamspace-TR-MUSIC and TR-ML methods on a two-dimensional electromagnetic heterogeneous dielectric scattering model of the breast