Feasability of compact dual-polarized phased antenna array radars

This paper presents a performance analysis of a compact microstrip patch antenna array with polarization diversity. We investigate the impact of the compactness and polarization purity on the performance of a planar patch array used for transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves for radar application. With the aim of investigating the receiving mode, we present results on the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for the estimation of direction of arrival (DoA) of impinging waves. We analyze how compactness and polarization affects the DoA estimation accuracy for waves impinging with different polarization characteristics. For the transmitting mode, we evaluate how the antenna array is capable of steering its beam to a desired direction, when a compact array is used, and how its polarization characteristics influence the beam steering.