Antenna Element Location Measurement System for Millimeter Wave, Airborne Antennas

In this proposal, Quadrant Engineering seeks SBIR funds to investigate development of an antenna element location measurement system suitable for compensating platform motions in airborne millimeter-wave antenna arrays. During Phase 1 we plan to evaluate three different approaches termed direct, active, and passive. In the direct approach, motion sensors attached to the antenna will be used to determine the position of each element in the array. The active approach uses one or more radiators to illuminate the array to measure phase variations proportional to position for each element. In the passive approach, statistical properties of the scene under observation are exploited to directly measure phase errors between adjacent elements in the array. This technique, currently in use to focus phased array radars, can be extended to synthetic aperture radiometers with minimal modification. The advantage of the passive approach is that it requires no ancillary measurement of the antenna locations - the incoming radiation itself is used to calibrate the array.