Wideband Capon Beamforming for a Planar Phased Radar Array with Antenna Switching Moon - Sik

Recently, there has been great interest in the development of advanced radar systems with phased arrays [1], [2]. In traditional multichannel radar array systems, the number of receivers should be equal to the number of receiving antennas, so the hardware expense and power consumption are very high [3]. A radar array system based on antenna switching is a promising substitute due to its lower cost and simpler front-end circuitry. Recently, several beamforming schemes for such switching-type linear phased radar array systems have been proposed, such as MUSIC signal processing to estimate the angle and velocity [4], an ESPRIT method to estimate the angle [5], and a Capon beamformer to find the angle, velocity, and range [6]. However, these algorithms using linear antenna arrays do not give a 2D direction finding of the azimuth and elevation angles. In this letter, we consider a planar phased radar array with antenna switching and propose a new wideband beamforming