Wideband Clustered Beam Direction Finding Algorithm via Combination and Verification under Linear Thinned Arrays

When linear arrays are sparse arrangement, forming beam according to DBF technology often has multiple high sidelobe gain, which cannot be directly used to estimate the radiation direction. To solve this problem, a wideband clustered beam direction finding algorithm is proposed. In this algorithm, a clustered beam table is built which contains the priori information about location and gain of the high sidelobes’ response. Then according to the output gain of each beam the direction of arrival (DOA) is determined by looking-up the built table. Experimental results show that this algorithm can effectively estimate multiple DOA with high accuracy and resolution.