High Accuracy and Unambiguous 2D-DOA Estimation With an Uniform Planar Array of “Long” Electric-Dipoles

For the polarization sensitive array considered in the most current literature, the physical length of the electric-dipole is less than 0.1 of a wavelength, and the radiation efficiency of this “short” electric-dipole is too low. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to study the array of “long” electric-dipole (the physical length lies within the range of [0.1, 1] of a wavelength). This paper constructs a sparse uniform planar array composed of the orthogonally oriented and spatially separated “long” tri-electric-dipole and proposes an algorithm to solve the problem of the 2-D direction-of-arrival (2-D-DOA) estimation with the proposed array. It is worth mentioning that the proposed algorithm does not require the prior knowledge of polarization parameters. Moreover, the spatially separated structure of the vector sensor is beneficial to engineering practice. Simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.