Effects of ground constituent parameters on array mutual coupling for DOA estimation

Effects of ground constituent parameters on the mutual coupling (MC) of monopole antenna array are investigated. This work augments an existing MC compensation technique for ground-based antennas and proposes reduction in mutual coupling for antennas over finite ground as compared to the perfect ground. The work is investigated by finite element method analysis, and numerical results are presented. A factor of 4 decrease in both the real and imaginary parts of the mutual coupling is observed when considering a poor ground versus a perfectly conducting one, for quarter-wave monopoles in receiving mode. A simulated result to show the errors in direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation with actual realization of the environment is also presented. © 2011 Irfan Ahmed et al