Estimation of Direction of Arrival Using Multipath on Array Platforms

We demonstrate that the utilization of the diffraction by antenna platforms increases the effective array aperture. We conduct the analysis on a realistic model of an airborne platform and use the Cramer-Rao bound to assess the level of improvement due to the presence of the platform. We show that the exploitation of the multipath enables us to resolve both azimuth and elevation with uniform linear arrays at single-frequency measurements. By using a uniform linear array of monopoles mounted on a metallic plate, we verify the results experimentally.