Linear filtering approaches for phase calibration of airborne arrays

Phase calibration of a large fluctuating millimeter-wave airborne antenna array is considered. The technique exploits properties of the correlation of the measured voltages arising from clutter returns at adjacent or nearby element pairs. The proposed calibration algorithm trades smoothing of the observations to reduce random errors with the ability to track the time-varying calibration phase. Algorithm performance is considered for an arbitrary linear filter, which generalizes previous work on analogous pulse-pair problems, and the results are used to choose optimal filter parameters. Numerical results are provided for a field experiment employing a 32-element Ku-band antenna array