Date of Award

12-2025

Degree Name

MS in Electrical Engineering

Department/Program

Electrical Engineering

College

College of Engineering

Advisor

Payam Nayeri

Advisor Department

Electrical Engineering

Advisor College

College of Engineering

Abstract

Direction finding algorithms are used with digital phased arrays to determine the incoming angle of arrival (AoA) of an incident signal. These algorithms, and direction finding as a whole, have a wide range of civilian and military applications from radar, electronic reconnaissance, mobile communication, et cetera. However, for situations where the spacing between antenna elements needs to be large, gating lobes appear in the radiation pattern of analog arrays. This work demonstrates that for digital beamforming algorithms, the field of view (FoV) of a uniform linear digital array matches the grating lobe free range of a similarly spaced analog array. In this work, FoV refers to the continuous range of values and incident signal can be and still be reliably detected by a direction finding algorithm.

Additionally, this work investigates several array spacing methods to expand the direction FoV of digital arrays for large element spacing. Methods applied to analog arrays, such as random jitter based spacing and low discrepancy sequences are explored. Slight modifications to these approaches result in moderate improvements to the FoV of widely spaced arrays. In contrast to these previous methods, a new Plus One spacing method is proposed and this work demonstrates that it is possible to maintain a full 180 degree FoV even with large minimum or average inter-element spacing.

The results presented in this work demonstrate that deterministic, non-uniform spacing methods can substantially improve the direction-finding performance of sparse arrays when either the minimum or average inter-element spacing is very large.

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