Estimating Azimuth and Elevation Angles when Mutual Coupling is Significant

J. E. Ferndndez del Rio. 0. M. Conde-Portilla. and M. F. Cdtedrat Departamento de Ingenierla de Comunicaciones, Universidad de Cantabria Avda. de 10s Castros s/n. 39005 Santander (Spain) Phone: +34 42 201493 Fax: +34 42 201873 E-mail: felipe~delfin.gsr.unican.es

Ahslract
The undesiruble eflects of mutuul coupling in the context o f direction finding,

ond u means of mitigirting them. iire shown in this communication. The arriving ruys
f U c r m s urruy. These elements consist of half--aure received ur the elements u wuvelength crossed dipoles. Errors introduced by mutuul coupling will be diminished by udding dummy elements to the originul cross urruy.

1. INTRODUCTION
We have presented an algorithm [ I ] based on the Matrix Pencil method that provides estimates of azimuth and elevation angles, polarization and average power of multiple narrowband incident waves. There, the electromagnetic energy was assumed to be collected at the terminals of short crossed dipoles. which were arranged in two orthogonal linear arrays. With such a configuration, a great reduction of mutual coupling effects is achieved, at the expense of worsening the signal-to-noise ratio (reduction of antenna efficiency). In order to extract more power from the wavefield, dipoles should be increased in length. at the risk of mutual coupling among array elements begins to introduce a considerable error in the estimations. In this work we analym the parasitic effects among array sensors when both length and separation between adjacent dipoles is U2. Also. a way of reducing errors in the estimates by meins of dummy dipoles is presented.

11. DATA IROVIDED BY THE ARRAY

Assume a cross array lying along the XY-plane as depicted in Fig. I . Each array element consists of two orthogonal electric dipoles that are U2 long, and the distance between two adjacent elements is U2. Now consider K narrow-band plane waves impinging on the cross array. Each wave is characterized by its arrival direction. i.e. azimuth. 4, and elevation, 0. angles; its polarization state. which is defined by two angles. yand tl 121; and its complex envelope, s(t). Thus, voltages collected by the i-th receiver could be modeled as

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where the superscript or the subscript xly indicates any magnitude measured at dipoles lying on the WY axis. And the subscripts x and y are used to denote any measurement with respect to the X and Y axes, respectively (see box in Fig. I). On the other hand, COS^ and cosp represent the direction cosines, and w is the noise associated with the instrumentation. N, is the number of sensors lying along the X-axis (ZN,is the number of dipoles along the X-axis), d, is the separation between two consecutive sensors centers. Finally, thef s are the radiation pattern of each dipole. Thus,f,.kOm,qjm) represents the radiation pattern of the i-th dipole lying along the X direction (in the presence of the rest of array dipoles), evaluated in the (Om,&,) direction and for 8 polarization. If one assumes d,=d,=N2, and dipoles of length N2, mutual coupling effects become significant, in such a way that fu.efJx., ( i # j ) even if dipoles i and j are identical. Nevertheless, radiation patterns tend to be similar when dummy dipoles are added to the original structure. This is done in Fig. 2, where two different configurations are shown. Keep in mind that voltages are measured only at dipoles of the original cross array, and that the rest of (dummy) dipoles are used to diminish the mutual coupling effects in the sense above mentioned. In this work, voltages measured at the terminals were calculated using the Method of Moments (MOM) as it is done in [3]. For this task, dipoles were assumed to be center loaded with an impedance of 50R.In order to analyze the noise sensitivity of the super-resolution algorithm of [ I ] , in presence of mutual coupling, voltages provided by the MOM (deterministic variables) where corrupted with white Gaussian noise, spatial and temporal uncorrelated.

111. SIMULATION EXAMPLE

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We have selected an example where the impact of mutual coupling is clearly relevant. In this example, voltages obtained with the MOM are corrupted by adding white Gaussian noise. Then, the super-resolution algorithm explained in [ I ] is applied to those noisy voltages. In particular. it is considered that two plane waves are inipinging on the array with angles (~~,)1)=(70".130"), and (8.h)=(65,140"). Wave I is left-hand circularly polarizd (fi,r],)=(45",9Oo), and wave 2 right-hand circularly d,=d,=U2, and polarized (fi,~l)=(45".-Y0"). Other features of the array are, Nx=N,=7, all dipoles are identical and U2 long. Both waves have the same power, and their complex envelopes have a tempral correlation of 0.9. The signal-to-noise ratio is IOdB and the original structure has the same features as those of example I , but the array is collecting I 0 0 snapshots. The algorithm was run 500 times (statistical realizations) and the resultant histogram is shown in Fig. 3. The super-resolution method is not working when it processes the voltages from the original structure. however the same algorithm is providing good estimates when dummy dipoles are included (cross structure of Fig. 2).

IV. CONCLUSIONS
We have presented a way of alleviating mutual coupling effects that consists of using dummy probes. arranged in different ways around the original structure.

References
[ 11 1. E. Fernhdez del Rlo and M. F. Chtedra-Perez. "Efficient configurations of the Matrix Pencil with data provided by two orthogonal linear arrays of electrically small dipoles," to appear in Digital Signol Prucessing . 121 J. Li. and K. T. Compton, Jr., 'Two-dimensional angle and polarization estimation using the ESPRIT algorithm". IEEE Trtrns. Antennas Propagot. vol. 40, no. 5, pp.550555. May 1992. 131 L.Valle, F. Rivas. and M. F. Catedra. "Combining the moment method with geometrical modeling by NURBS surfaces and Btzier patches," lEEE Trans. Antennas Pruprgut., vol. 42. no. 3, pp. 373-381. M3r. 1994.

't

Fig. 1 Original structure: a cross array of crossed U2 dipoles. Inside the box a local reference system, used in this communication. is shown.

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Fig. 2 Cross and sawtooth structures.Two different ways of adding dummy elements.

Original Structure
wsa2

cosal

cos 8 2 ma P I

cosine

Cross
cosa2

cosa,

C-PZ

COSPl

cosine

Fig. 3 Processing data collected at the 'original structure it does not allow IO distinguish cosa, from cosaz. This problem is circumvented when voltages are taken from the cross structure. Vertical lines with a circle or a square on the top denote actual values.

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