A New Emitter Localization Technique Using Airborne Direction Finder Sensor

In this paper, a new method is introduced to locate emitters using the angle of arrival (AOA), when the navigation systems are unable to report the location of the receiver. In our proposed framework, a moving receiver equipped with a direction-finding system locates the targets using the directions from which these targets are sensed. For this purpose, the receiver would need to know its own exact location using navigation systems. However, in certain circumstances such as long time flights, the reports from these navigation systems might be unavailable or unreliable. Therefore, in such cases, known emitters’ direction of arrival and location can be used to locate the receiver and target using regular AOA position finding (PF) method in two stages. In the first stage, receiver’s location is estimated using the signals received from known emitters and in the second stage the unknown emitter’s location is obtained utilizing the estimated receiver’s location and the direction of unknown emitters. In this work, we introduce a new scheme for such circumstances to locate the receiver and unknown emitter in a single step with a closed- form formulation and improved precision. Additionally, three different approaches are proposed to solve the new formulation. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed method offers more accurate results in comparison to the conventional schemes.