A gain and phase autocalibration approach for large-scale planar antenna arrays

A novel approach for the gain-phase error calibration with a large-scale planar array is proposed in this letter. We show that minimizing the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation error is asymptotically equivalent to minimizing the sample second moment of the phase error. Therefore, with the mixing matrix obtained by blind signal separation, the 2-D DOA is estimated by finding the minimum point of a binary function with a large-scale planar array. Subsequently, the gain-phase error is obtained using the estimated DOAs. The proposed noniterative method requires neither prior calibration information nor the DOA of the signal source, and one incident signal is sufficient for the joint estimation of DOAs and gain-phase errors. Finally, the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated via numerical simulations.