Evaluation of angle of arrival estimators using real multipath data

This paper presents the results of a performance evaluation that were made on two angle of target arrival estimation schemes that are suitable for use in a low-angle tracking radar environment. The two schemes were: (1) A maximum likelihood receiver, and (2) an adaptive cancellation scheme supplied with a calibration curve. The paper also describes a sampled aperture radar facility that has been developed at the Communications Research Centre (Ottawa) for multipath radar studies. The facility was used to obtain multipath data for evaluating the performance of these two estimators. The results show that, under the right conditions, both processors are capable of resolving an angle of target arrival equal to a small fraction of a beamwidth, using one snapshot of array data. The results also show that the adaptive cancellation scheme, consistently, has a slightly better performance than the maximum likelihood receiver.