A Study on measurement of characteristics of Transmitted Receiver Module’s combined antenna for a RADAR system calibration

Abstract

The antenna system of the active phased array radar is composed of parallel transmission and reception paths. The transmission and reception paths of the parallel structure include nonlinear errors. And a long time test measurement is performed using a large measuring facility to align them electrically. If components in parallel path are replaced, a radar system has to calibrate a difference of characteristic to maintain the alignment as confirmed by the test before. In the case of an array radar system with many transmitted receiver module(TRM)s, an efficient calibration algorithm is required, which takes into account operating time and initial alignment error. Especially in the case of TRM, which is designed as an integrated antenna considering the maintenance property, The transmission characteristics of the TRM can be measured, and the measured data can be utilized for the calibration of the antenna system. In this antenna system calibration method, the measuring equipment should be managed, because the influence of the characteristics of the measuring equipment on the compensation state should be minimized. In this paper, we explain a measurement method for the characteristics of a TRM designed as an integrated antenna, and propose a method to compensate the characteristics of measuring equipment. And the effectiveness of the proposed calibration method is verified through simulation.