Experimental study of mutual coupling compensation in direction finding using a compact antenna array

An experimental study of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation using a compact antenna array is presented. Compared to standard antenna array with a half wavelength element separation, the element separation of the compact array used in this experiment is only a quarter wavelength. As will be demonstrated, the strong mutual coupling effect of this compact array can be almost totally removed by using the measured receiving mutual impedances, resulting in much higher accuracies in the estimation of DOAs.