A Compact, Lightweight Sensor to Measure Bearing Angle to a Radio Transmitter

Liangchun Xu

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	*ION GNSS+ 2017 Student Paper Award Winner* This paper describes a novel compact, lightweight sensor to measure the bearing angle to a radio transmitter. The proposed angleof-arrival (AoA) sensor consists of a flat antenna array, which is composed of dipole and loop antenna elements. The dipole and loop antennas are quite small in size compared with the wavelength of the sensor’s operating frequency. Therefore, the proposed antenna array is compact and very tolerant to manufacturing error (since antenna elements do not operate at their excitation frequency). The AoA estimate is obtained from signal magnitude measurements at each antenna element. A look-up table is employed to invert the bearing angle of the incoming signal given the observed signal magnitude at each antenna element. A sensitivity study indicates that the sensor performs well as long as the overall system design, including signal processing, delivers a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) exceeding 42 dB.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 30th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2017) September 25 - 29, 2017 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon
Pages:	758 - 766
Cite this article:	Xu, Liangchun, "A Compact, Lightweight Sensor to Measure Bearing Angle to a Radio Transmitter," Proceedings of the 30th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2017), Portland, Oregon, September 2017, pp. 758-766. https://doi.org/10.33012/2017.15355
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