Continuous Beam-Steering for Phaseless Direction of Arrival Estimation

This paper presents a system capable of continuous beam steering for Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation operating at 2.45 GHz, based on the use of a digitally controlled beam-forming network and exploiting a bi-modal circularly polarized patch antenna. The network is composed by a digitally controlled attenuator, a phase-shifter, and a Wilkinson power divider. The specific achieved beam-set constitutes the key feature that allows the DoA estimation approach, based on the phaseless magnitude data of the received signals. Experimental validation confirms a DoA estimation error as low as 0.7° within the range from -90° to +90°, with a standard deviation of 0.6°