Direction-of-Arrival Estimation for High-Frequency Radar on a Floating Platform

For flexibility and wider working area, it would be a good idea to mount high-frequency radar on a floating platform. But under the condition, new problems will appear. When the platform is rotating on sea surface, the direction-of-arrival to the receiving array keeps shifting which causes the uncertainty of arrival direction estimation. And in the paper, we try to improve the precision of direction-of-arrival estimation. A description of the method could be fixed-beams minimum-mean-square error beam forming. The method consists of two ideas: 1) the idea to convert data form rotating antenna channels into fixed beam channels; 2) the constraint of minimum-mean-square-error based on antenna patterns to adaptively generate the weight for the conversion. For uniform circular array and two kinds of rotation, the simulations have been conducted. The azimuth searching spectrum around the set direction gets much sharp. And accuracy for estimated direction of the set object is greatly improved.