A novel spatially spread electromagnetic vector sensor for high-accuracy 2-D DOA estimation

In this paper, a new spatially spread electromagnetic vector sensor (SS-EMVS) is proposed by a two-step design. In addition, a novel DOA estimator with coarse-fine estimate combination is presented for the proposed array. The first step aims to make the configurations of SS-EMVS satisfy the “vector cross-product” estimator, leading to a coarse estimation of three direction-cosines. The second step focuses on extending the two dimensional (2-D) array apertures of SS-EMVS, resulting in two fine but ambiguous estimations on the direction-cosines by extracting inter-sensor phase-delay. Combination the coarse and fine estimations, the high-accuracy 2-D DOA estimation can be obtained by using the coarse estimation to disambiguate the fine estimation. The three- dipoles and loops of the proposed configuration are located separately, which are found to reduce mutual coupling as compared with collocated EMVS. Moreover, the new configuration is able to extend 2-D array aperture to improve the accuracy of 2-D direction-finding. Numerical Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.