Direction finding for coherently distributed sources with gain-phase errors

—Affected by multipath propagation as well as the receiving conditions of an actual array, a distributed source model considering array uncertainties/errors is more consistent with the realistic scenarios. In this paper, a new direction finding method for coherently distributed (CD) sources in the presence of array gain-phase errors is proposed. By exploiting partly calibrated uniform linear arrays (ULA), the gain-phase errors are first estimated according to the relationship of elements of array covariance matrix, and then a two-step iterative procedure is introduced to achieve a joint estimation of nominal DOA and angular spread from sparse recovery perspective. Performance analysis and related Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) are also provided. Numerical examples show that the proposed method can provide improved resolution and estimation accuracy, and performs almost independently of gain-phase errors. © 2021, Electromagnetics Academy. All rights reserved.