S. V. Abyshev
MIREA — Russian Technological University (Moscow, Russia)

Small-scale aerial vehicles are increasingly being used for civilian and military applications. Timely detection of the small-scale aerial vehicles plays an important role, as there are opportunities to interfere with command, control, and navigation channels by various radio countermeasures.

The aim of the article is to investigate methods for estimating the spatial direction of signal arrival angles for localization of small-scale aerial vehicles.

Methods for estimating the direction of signal arrival angles are considered. Thus, the method of formation of a virtual radiation pattern assumes that the individual elements of the digital receiving antenna array form a total radiation pattern, after which, at each point in time is measured the level of the total received signal. Then, the maximum value in the direction is considered to be true. Minimum dispersion method, serves to overcome the low resolution of the beamforming method in the presence of several narrowband signal sources from different directions, which uses not only the useful signals coming from mall-scale aerial vehicles, but also unwanted signals created by other sources. The robust method is also presented, which allows not to use signals from all directions, but to make data sampling both with overlapping of separate elements of the digital receiving antenna array and without overlapping. On the basis of the robust method, quantitative modeling of the signal arrival estimation was performed.

The considered methods can serve in the development of means of localization of small-scale aerial vehicles.

Abyshev S.V. Methods of small-scale aerial vehicles localization. Antennas. 2022. № 2. P. 47–52. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18127/ j03209601-202202-06 (in Russian)

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