Improved Two-Antenna Direction Finding Inspired by Human Ears

Abstract

This paper presents an improved two-antenna microwave passive direction finding system inspired by the human auditory system. By incorporating a head-like scatterer between two monopole antennas, both phase and magnitude information can be utilized to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) of a microwave signal, thus eliminating ambiguities associated with phase wrapping at high frequency, just like human ears. In addition, better DOA sensitivity is demonstrated with the incorporation of the head-like scatterer. Both numerical modeling and experimental results of a simple X-band two-monopole configuration with symmetric and asymmetric scatterers are presented.