OVER-THE-HORIZON RADAR ARRAY CALIBRATION USING ECHOES FROM IONIZED METEOR TRAILS

The Weiss-Friedlander MUSIC-type approach for estimating sensor positi ons 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 sourc es of opportunity from an array calibration perspective. This method u ses 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 conduc ted, using an experimentally measured coupling matrix, to illustrate t he good performance of this method and to show that it is statisticall y efficient.