Raytheon Company

Kim Mcinturff

Amedeo Larussi

Andrew Huard

Donald H Archer

Wilbur H Thies

Alfred I Mintzer

Systems and methods are disclosed herein which facilitate generating and utilizing look-up tables for determining an AoA of a radar signal received from an emitter. In example embodiments, the systems and methods may involve a selectivity process for selecting, for each of a plurality of installation positions, an installation-representative antenna pattern as selected from an option set. Thus, the selectivity process may, for example, include indexing a plurality of data sets of antenna patterns associated with an antenna position and selecting a most representative data set from at least one of the indexed data sets. In some embodiments, the system and methods may further apply a compression algorithm which identifies changes in slope with respect to adjacent pairs of antenna positions (vertex pairs) in the look-up table. The algorithm may then discard any antenna position (any vertex) that does not meet a slope difference threshold with respect to changes in the slope.

Systems and methods for antenna analysis and validation

Characterizing a radiation pattern of an antenna, accurately, is needed to improve the determination of an angle arrival of a radar signal received by the antenna. Accordingly, an optimized monotonic fitting approach with corresponding method and system are provided. The approach represents an approximation of the radiation pattern as a window map having a plurality of windows. The approach finds an optimized monotonic fit of the radiation pattern by adjusting the window map, one window at a time, and testing the resulting new approximations. The approach tests whether a new approximation is a better fit then the other approximations, is monotonic, and has a minimum slope. The approach enforces monotonicity and a minimum slope for ambiguity resolution. The approach further includes calculating an angle arrival of the radar signal based on the optimized monotonic fit.

Optimized monotonic radiation pattern fit with ambiguity resolution

An amplitude monopulse direction finding system is disclosed. The system is built around a circular array with a circular lens in which the antenna elements and array ports are larger than in conventional systems. The oversized antenna elements and array ports provide a wide range of operating frequencies for the direction finding system. Additionally, the direction finding system contains an omni-directional probe at the center of the lens to detect the presence of signals. In an alternative embodiment, each array port is split into two halves which can be combined in different ways to produce different beam patterns, allowing the beam pattern providing the best signal to noise ratio to be selected. Also, built-in-test circuitry is described.

Growing community of inventors

Santa Barbara, CA, United States of America

Kim Mcinturff