Over-the-horizon radar array calibration using echoes from ionised meteor trails

Abstract

The Weiss–Friedlander MUSIC-type approach for estimating sensor positions and mutual coupling are combined and extended for over-the-horizon radar applications. The proposed method exploits backscattered echoes from ionised meteor trails, which can be considered as disjoint sources of opportunity from an array calibration perspective. This method uses a more accurate model for the coupling matrix, with more unknowns, and estimates the coupling matrix and sensor positions using disjoint sources of unknown direction-of-arrival. Simulations have been conducted, using an experimentally measured coupling matrix, to illustrate the good performance of this method and to show that it is statistically efficient.