A New Approach to the Design of Broad-Band Element Space Antenna Array Processors

In this paper, a new approach to the design of broad-band time-domain element space antenna array processors is presented. The basic approach is based on the idea of minimizing the mean-square deviation between the desired look-direction response and the response of the processor over a frequency band of interest. With this approach, three types of presteering can be handled: No presteering, coarse presteering, and exact presteering. The elimination of presteering time delays is important in a digital implementation of antenna array processors. The relationship that the new processor has to other broad-band processors is explored and the significance of the parameters associated with the new processor is established. Furthermore, the approach presented enables various types of errors and mismatches between signal model and actual scenario to be incorporated in the problem formulation.