In-Field Calibration of Antennas or Antenna Arrays Using Wavefield Modeling

Abstract

Direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation of radio signals requires accurate knowledge of the employed antenna array characteristics, which is usually obtained by calibration in a measurement chamber. Contrarily we propose an in-field calibration method, which does not require knowledge of the propagation channel or synchronization between transmitter and receiver. In contrast to the literature, the proposed method can be applied to multiport antenna systems of arbitrary type and interpolation of the antenna response between the discrete calibration DoAs is inherently performed using wavefield modeling. Simulations show that in-field calibration at sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enables precise DoA estimation.