Abstract : Direction Finding (DF) systems have long been an area of intense research within the Air Force Research Laboratory. There are presently two types of existing DF systems: wideband multi-mode antennas and interferometers. Wideband multi-mode DF systems allow for a large bandwidth but present a low resolution and high variance. Interferometers provide high accuracy and low variance but are narrow band and require a large number of single aperture antenna elements. An effort has commenced to incorporate a broadband DF system with high resolution using two multi-mode spiral antennas. Using an interferometer of multi-mode elements, we can provide high resolution and wideband operation without using numerous antennas. This paper presents the results of extensive wideband measurements carried out on a four-arm spiral antenna and the associated modeformer. These measurements are used to assess and validate the angle estimation capability of the multi-arm spiral antenna.
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