Direction finding with circular arrays via phase mode excitation and Root-MUSIC

The authors develop an algorithm for estimating the azimuth angles of narrowband signals incident upon a uniform circular array of identical antennas. The method operates in beamspace and relies on the phase mode excitation technique to synthesize sinc type beam-patterns in the array plane (elevation=90 degrees ). The sinc structure allows the use of a root version of the MUSIC algorithm to perform the azimuthal search at each elevation angle under consideration. Besides the ability to use Root-MUSIC, the algorithm provides computational savings in that it requires only a single real-valued eigenvalue decomposition. This follows since the far-field patterns synthesized are entirely real-valued.<>