USA as Represented by Secretary of the Navy

Henry J Schmidt

James W Bond

The Beamformer with Adaptive Processors is a practical joint spatial-templ processor suitable for combining multiple antenna signals for a communications receiver. The invention identifies a beam or beams, amongst a discreet set of fixed beams, for which adaptive locally optimum processing will most likely reveal the presence of a weak signal. The invention chooses a suitable form of adaptive locally optimum processing according to the nature of the beam or beams identified. The beam or beams are selected for adaptive locally optimum processing depending on several simple characteristics of a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of each beam's output. These are .SIGMA..sigma..sup.2, D, and B (the sum of the squares of the Fourier coefficients, the number of distinct peaks amongst these coefficients, and the total number of coefficients defining the peaks, respectively). A simple logic table is used to define the beam or beams to be used for adaptive processing and to define the nature of the adaptive processing to be used on the beams identified to most likely reveal the presence of a weak signal. The result of the combination of selecting the most promising beam or beams and appropriately adaptively processing the beam or beams is a near optimal implementation of a joint temporal-spatial processor.

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Silver Spring, MD, United States of America

Henry J Schmidt