Fast Calibration of Beam Pointing Directions Based on Principal Component Analysis for Phased Arrays

The actual beam pointing directions of a phased array antenna can be different from the designed ones, which may cause serious consequences in radar applications. Conventional calibration methods require measurements of nearly all angles, which is very time-consuming. This paper introduces a fast calibration method based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which only requires measurements at partial angles. The PCA extracts characteristics of beam pointing direction errors at those measured angles and predicts the actual beam pointing directions at all required angles. Experiments show that, the standard deviation of the discrepancies between the predicted and actual beam pointing directions is approximately 0.053° when only 1/10 of the angles are measured. Hence, the proposed fast calibration method is valid.