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An Analysis Method for Solving Ambiguity in Direction Finding with Phase Interferometers

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Abstract

The phase interferometer is an effective direction finding (DF) method. It is widely utilized in various electronic reconnaissance systems due to its advantages of fast operation and high precision. In a wideband system, the combination of long and short baselines, or even multi-level baselines, is applied in an interferometer to solve the contradiction between accuracy and phase ambiguity for DF. In this paper, a novel analysis method is proposed to obtain the probability of successfully solving ambiguity based on mathematical statistics. According to the length ratio between short and long baselines, the joint density function of phase errors can be derived. Then, the probability can be achieved under different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) by integrating the joint density function in a specific interval. Furthermore, the formula of phase measurement error is adjusted by the least square method to improve computational accuracy in low SNR during the process. Under different baseline configurations, the strategy can provide the theoretical probability of successfully solving ambiguity, thus guiding the baseline design for obtaining a maximum probability without impacting the specified DF accuracy. Simulation results show that the mathematical model is efficient in some complex cases.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated during and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their careful work. This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in Key Laboratory of Advanced Marine Communication and Information Technology (No. 3072020CF0815).

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  1. College of Information and Communication Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, 150001, China

    Lutao Liu & Tao Yu

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  1. Lutao Liu
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  2. Tao Yu
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Correspondence to Tao Yu.

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Liu, L., Yu, T. An Analysis Method for Solving Ambiguity in Direction Finding with Phase Interferometers. Circuits Syst Signal Process 40, 1420–1437 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-020-01536-1

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