Antenna array calibration employing calibration beacons and steering vector estimation

A calibration scheme for factory and in-operation calibration of uniform linear array (ULA) antennas was proposed. One of the merits of this scheme is to reduce the efforts to determine the mutual coupling matrix in a factory calibration. The mutual coupling matrix of an N-element array can be precisely estimated making only 2N measurements. The in-operation calibration of the array only needs a single calibration beacon in the ideal case. Simulations showed that the remaining deviations after calibration are negligible for beamforming and signal processing schemes like MUSIC.