Improving the accuracy of a digital spectral correlation-interferometric method of direction finding with analytical signal reconstruction for processing an incomplete spectrum of the signal

Abstract

A method of correlation-interferometric direction finding has been improved, which effectively solves the problem of radio direction finding of radio emission sources under conditions of exposure to one or two masking interference. The problem was solved using the selection of an unmasked fragment of the spatial spectrum of the signal and the reconstruction of the missing samples of its signal group. As a result of the synthesis of the proposed method, estimates of signal samples were obtained as exact solutions to the proposed energy balance equations. The resulting solutions provide a significant increase in the signal-to-interference ratio and, accordingly, direction-finding accuracy without increasing the number of reception channels of the antenna array. As a result of the simulation, the dependences of the standard deviation of the bearing estimate on the signal-to-noise ratio in the presence of interference were built. Under the influence of one or two masking interferences and a signal-to-interference ratio of 0 dB, the use of the known direction-finding method without interference selection produces an anomalously large direction-finding error of more than 0.42 degrees, which is practically independent of the signal-to-noise ratio. The direction-finding method with selection of spectral signal samples masked by interference reduces the direction-finding error to 0.22 degrees when exposed to one interference and to 0.3 degrees when exposed to two interferences. This is due to the presence of power losses of the usable signal during the selection of its samples masked by interference. The proposed method of direction finding with reconstruction of signal samples provides a significant gain in accuracy by 3–30 times compared to the method of selection of masked samples in the range of changes in the signal-to-noise ratio (–20.5) dB. The direction-finding error of the proposed method decreases with increasing signal/noise according to a hyperbolic dependence. It is advisable to use the proposed direction-finding method when masking no more than two samples of the signal group