Steering broadband beamforming without pre-steering

Steering delays are used in broadband beamformers to steer the array in the look direction. Steering delays have to be frequency independent in order to operate for broadband signals. A wide variety of true-time-delay steering techniques are used to achieve this. All of these techniques are subject to power loss, quantization errors and other problems depending upon the particular method used. This paper presents a new approach to steer a broadband beamformer without the need to employ steering delays. The approach is based on a broadband processing using discrete Fourier transform method to obtain time domain weights. This method estimates the weights of the Frost type processor with a specified frequency response in the look direction without using steering delays in front of the broadband processor. The simulation results show the performance of this method for various scenarios.