Direction of arrival estimation using single tripole radio antenna

Abstract

We consider the problem of estimating the Direction of Arrival (DOA) of multiple waves incident on a single tripole sensor. Using the physical properties of the electric and magnetic fields, we show that we can disambiguate the DOA of multiple simultaneously incident waves using a set of time sampled 3D measurements from the single sensor. This is different from the traditional approach that uses arrays of antennas to estimate DOA. We use the Unitary Matrix Pencil method to estimate the frequencies of the waves, and use a least squares solver to estimate the amplitude and phase coef-ficients. We combine these to compute the DOA and evaluate the approach using simulations. We show that the method is very effective at estimating DOA for different numbers of incident waves, and different noise levels. ©2009 IEEE.