Sequentical beamspace beamforming

Beamforming is an array processing technique that is applicable for either radiation or reception. In receiving beamforming an array collects spatial samples of impinging waveforms, and then a set of carefully calculated weights are applied to the multi-channel data to separate the desired signal from unwanted interference. In this paper we describe a sequential beamspace beamforming method using sequential beamspace data instead of element space data. We use a set of orthogonal beams to transfer element space data to beamspace and then apply a beamforming algorithm to obtain a filtered signal highly correlative to the original signal. The advantages of this method include a reduction in the computational burden for element space beamforming using an array with many elements, and the suppression of numerous interferers originating from directions other than the desired direction. The algorithms have been implemented on an 8 element uniform circular array (UCA) and an 8 channel analog beamformer (BF) operating at 5.8 GHz.¹²