Sensor self-calibration methods for a passive conformal airborne antenna

This paper presents self-calibration methods applied to passive conformal airborne antenna. The sensors of the array are mounted under large wing of an aircraft. During the flight, sensors are subjected to important static distortions and dynamical vibrations so that the array must be self-calibrated in order to keep the optimal performance of localization. This self-calibration is globally a non-observable problem but it may be solved locally using a sufficient number of sources or mechanical distortion models. Two approaches of self-calibration methods are exposed. They allow solving for phase ambiguities and false positions problem due to deformations larger than half the wavelength.