A Frequency Domain Implementation of the Butler

Matrix Direction Finder

Y.T. Chan* Q. Yuan* R. Inkolt
* Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston,
Ontario, Canada K7K 5LO
t Defence Research Establishment Ottawa, Department of National Defence, Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada K1A 024

Abstract-The Adcock-Butler Matrix (ABM) antenna ar- 11. A FREQUENCY

DOMAIN FINDER
DIRECTION
ray is a common direction finder but has the drawback of
requiring complex analogue components such as hybrids, A . The ABM
phase shifters and phase comparators. This paper presents
a new direction finder which is a digital, frequency domain
Fig. 1 is the block diagram of the ABM, which is a cir-
version of ABM. It obtains bearing estimation at each fre- cular antenna array direction finder [5]. Let the radius of
quency bin and combines them to give a weighted average. the circle be R and consider a signal f ( t ) arriving at the
Bias reduction and interference nulling are easy t o incorpo- array center with a bearing of 8, with respect to the N-S
rate into the scheme. Simulation studies show that this new
direction finder has much lower estimation errors than the direction, as shown in Fig. 2. Let
ABM, and can easily null out a sinusoidal interference.
r1 = Rcos8/C, TZ = RsinO/C (1)
The signal arriving at the N antenna will be ahead in time
I. INTRODUCTION
by T I , compared with the one arriving at the center of the
Direction finding is the determination of the bearing of array. Using similar reasoning gives the four outputs
an emitting source through interception and processing of
its signal. Two direction finders operating at separate loca- N ( t )= f ( t + T i ) , = f ( t + Tz)
tions can then fix the source position through triangulation, S(t) = f ( t - T l ) , W ( t )= f ( t - Tz) (2)
for a source lying on a two-dimensional surface. Source lo-
Suppose f ( t ) = cos(w,t++), where w, is the frequency of
calization has a wide variety of applications in sonar [l],
the sinusoid and 4 its phase, then the output in (2), after
electronic warfare, search and rescue [2], [3] and mobile
passing through the ABM network in Fig. 1, will produce
communications [4].
Typical direction finders have a receiving array whose f l ( t )= -2Jsin2 wcT1+sin2 w,rz cos(w,t++-z) (3)
output contains signals from the emitting source but
at different arrival times. These time difference of ar- +
fo(t) = 2(COSWcT1 COSWcT2) COS(bJ,t + 4) (4)
rivals (TDOA) are a function of the angle at which the where z = tan-'{sinwcr1/ sinwcrz} (5)
signal wave front intersects the array. Examples of direc-
tion finders in use at radio frequencies are the Adcock and Since sincp M cp for small cp, say less than 0.02 radians, then
the Butler Matrix (ABM) based circular array [5], and for if W , T ~ and W ~ T Zare sufficiently small, (5) yields
sonar, the towed array and sonobuoys [6]. z M tan-'{cos e/ sin e} (6)
The present ABM systems employ analogue processing
which requires complex circuits to perform phase shifts The phase comparator output is thus the bearing esti-
and comparisons in the time domain [5]. They often suf- mate 8.
fer from significant systemic estimation errors, particularly In addition to the errors caused by corrupting noises re-
for wideband signals. By performing digital processing in ceived at the antenna array, the estimate 8 contains three
the frequency domain, this paper gives an alternative to systemic errors. The first one comes from the approxima-
ABM, called Frequency Domain Butler Matrix direction tion in ( 6 ) and is given in [5] as
finder (FDBM). It offers improvement in estimation accu- 6-8M CY' sin 46/24, where CY = w,R/C (7)
racy, together with flexibility and simplicity in implemen-
tation, and can easily suppress an interfering sinusoidal This error is maximum when 48 = (odd integerx;). Sec-
signal. ondly, the hybrid network introduces errors in phase shift-
The organization of this paper is as follows. Section I1 ing a signal. This phase error is dependent on the hybrid
begins with a brief description of the ABM direction finder, network design, bandwidth of the signal, as well as the car-
followed by the development of the new frequency do- rier frequency U,. The third source of error comes from the
main (FDBM) version. Section I11 contains the simulation phase comparator. It requires w, to find the relative phase
results, which compare the performance of the ABM and between fl(t) and fo(t) in (3) and (4). Hence inaccuracies
' FDBM. The conclusions are-in Section IV. in the measurement of wc will add errors to b.
01999 IEEE
0-7803-5582-2/99/$10.00 556
 In (9),k is the frequency number corresponding to the
frequency
Phase shiFrci
I k = 0,1, * * . , L - 1
fs/L,
wk = 27~k (10)
90'

hybrid
and X i l ( k ) is the DFT of the 1 t h segment of zi(n),of length
hybrid
L points. Thus for example if N = 1024 and L = 256 with
1800 90°
a 50% overlap, the number of segments n, = 7. With

hybrid
1=1 1=1
1800 hybrid I800
where Fl(k) and & ( k ) are respectively the DFT of the I th
n.0 "=I n=?
segment of f ( n )and zi(n),the DFT of (8) is

Phase Errimarcd carrier +

x , ( k ) = F(k)ejWkT1 ~ l ( k )
frquenc).
+
xZ(k) = F ( k ) e j W k T 2 & ( k )
Baring estimate X3(k) = F(k)e-jWkT1+ &(IC)
acowr 1 bcomr a wso r I bcoswr ~ 4 ( k ) = F(k)e-jWkT2 & ( k ) + (12)
185'hybrid 95'hybrid
The phase shifts WkT1 and WkT2 come from the relation that
a time shift in the time domain is equivalent to a phase shift
in the frequency domain.
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the four antenna ABM Let

//

/'
/
/ with
I
YW +
F ( k )= R ( k ) j I ( k ) (14)
\
\
\
and +
z l ( k ) - z3(k) = N R ( k ) j N I ( k ) (15)
\
'. Putting (14) and (15) into (13) results in

D l ( k ) = - 2 I ( k ) sinwkT1 + N R ( ~ )
Fig. 2. TDOA as a function of bearing
+ +
j [2R(k) sin wk71 N I ( ~ ) ] (16)

B. The FDBM Similarly, with

Consider next the digital processing of the antenna out-
put and the estimation of 0 in the frequency domain. In z2(k) - z 4 ( k ) = W R ( k )+ j W I ( k ) (17)
the presence of noise, the samples of (2) are The difference between the E and W output DFT is
+
n ( n ) = f ( n 71) + z1(n), z2(72) = f(n 72) 22(n) + + &(k) = X2(k) - X4(k) = -2I(k) sinwkn +W R ( ~ )
+
53(n) = f ( n - 71) 23(n), z4(n) = f(n - 72) + -t4(72) (8)
+j[2~(k)sinwkn ~ 1 ( k ) ] +
(18)
for n = 0 , 1 , . . . , N- 1. In (8), q ( n ) denotes the samples
Let Re(.) and Irn(.) be the real and imaginary components
of N ( t ) , ~ ( 7 2 )of E ( t ) , 53(n) of S ( t ) and z4(72) of W ( t ) .
of the complex number inside the brackets, then
Without loss of generality, the sampling interval T = l/fs is
taken to be unity and the noise sequences zi(n),i = 1 , 2 , 3 , 4
contains independent (of each other and of f ( n ) ) ,Gaussian,
zero mean band-limited white noise samples [8] of variance
a2. - sin w k ~ [22R ( k ) - 2I(k ) ] WR( k ) W I( k ) + +
sin wk71[2R(k)- 21( IC)] +N R (IC) +N I (IC)
Taking the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of ( 8 ) , with
segmentation and averaging [7], gives When there is no noise and when the approximation
sinwkT, M WkT,, m = 1 , 2 , holds, (19) gives

1=1 1=1 r ( k ) M sin e/ cos 8 (20)

557
Hence an estimate of 8, using the DFT components at Wk, Putting (22) into (31) gives
is
e ( k ) = tan-'(r(k))

n o m (81,the variance of 6 ( k ) is
To find an estimate for 0:. consider first the estimate

Then the estimate for CJ; is

Let
w k = k 2 ( R ( k )- I(k))' (231 (34)
Then the optimum combination of the d(k) to produce 8 is
which replaces CT; in (32) to produce 0; on line.
L-1 L-1

c 1,=,
This FDBM has several advantages over the ABM. It
6= e(k)Wk w k (241 provides a high implementation flexibility and it is easy to
k=l extend the FDBM to arrays that have more than four an-
Note that in (24), the summation is from k = 1 to $ - 1 tennas. It uses information from all frequency components
because there is no phase information in the DFT compo- and the weighting in (24) gives an improvement in estima-
nents Xi(k) for k = 0 and $. Additionally, since R(k) or tion accuracy. It is also possible to perform bias reduction,
I ( k ) is not available, (23) uses instead the estimates and selective frequency weighting to null out interference.
Thus if there is an interference at a known frequency, the
w k corresponding to that frequency can simply be made
( R ( k )- M IP(k)12 - I r n { P ( k ) 2 } (251
equal to zero, thus eliminating the interference. The vari-
with ance of 6 in (32) is an important measure which is not
available in the ABM. Its value is required in assessing the
P ( q 2= (XI(k)Xdk)+ X2(k)X'l(k))/2 (26) possible localization accuracy if the eventual aim for direc-
Now the estimate (21) has bias as given by (7). A cor- tion finding is position location.
rection is possible by subtracting the bias from d(k) to give 111. SIMULATION STUDIES
a k This section describes three experiments to evaluate the
B(k) = - - sine, where a k =w k R / C (27)
24 FDBM, and compare its performance against the ABM.
In all the experiments, the sampling frequency fs = 60 x
and 8 comes from (24). Then the bias corrected estimate
lo6 Hz and each antenna output has N = 1024 data points.
is
The independent noise sources are output of four separate
$-1 L-1
Gaussian random number generators with zero mean and
e= k= 1
e(k)wk/
k= 1
w k (28) variance of c2. To compute the spectral components Xi(k),
the DFT routine divides the 1024 points into seven seg-
ments of 256 points, with a 50% overlap. Thus L is 256 in
Note that because of the bias correction in (27), 6 will (10). Next, it takes the fast Fourier transform of each seg-
have a higher variance than e. More importantly, however, ment and then averages the seven segments to give X i ( k ) .
8 has a lower mean square error than 8, as shown in the Each experiment conducts 250 independent trials to give
simulation studies. the root mean square error
Next, an estimate of the variance of 8 is, from (24),

Since the DFT components of white noise samples are in-

RMSE =
rC (ei- e)2/250
i= 1 I+
The array radius R is 2 m and C is 2.99776 x los m/sec.
(35)

dependent, A . Experiment 1
The signal in this case is a sinusoid of frequency fc =
(30) 15 MHz so that
where 6 k l is the Kronecker delta.
f (n)= A sin(0.51rn)
Using (30) to simplify (29) yields
and the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is

(31) A2
SNR(dB) = lolog - (37)
2c9
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 REFERENCES
Carter, G. C. “Time Delay Estimation for Passive Sonar Signal
Signal FDBM Processing”, IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, Vol. 29, No. 3,
pp. 463-470, June 1981.
I
Bandwidth Bearing- SNR(dB)
\
OFF I ON I Wiley, R. G. “Principles of Secure Communication System”,
30 I 30.5” I 2.55” I Artech House, Norwood, MA, 1985.
Torrieri, D. J. “Electronic Intelligence: T h e Interception of Ra-
10.0’ 10 25.9” 3.39” dio Signals” Artech House, Norwood, MA, 1985.
20 MHz 30 19.7” 2.27” Rappaport, T. S., Reed, J. H. and Woerner, B. D. “Position
22.5’ 10 16.4” 4.40” Location Using Wireless Communication on Highways of the
Future”, IEEE Communication Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 10,
pp. 33-41, Oct. 1996.
Guy, J. R. F. and Davies, D. E. N. “Studies of the Adcock
Direction Finder in Terms of Phase-mode Excitations around
Fig. 3 contains plots of the RMSE of the two direction Circular Arrays”, The Radio and Electronic Engineer, Vol. 53,
finders FDBM and ABM against SNR(dB). It also contains No. 1, pp. 33-38, January 1983.
Chan, Y. T. (Editor) Underwater Acoustic Data Processing,
the square root of the Cram&-Rao lower bound ( C U B ) Series E: Applied Sciences. Vol. 16, Kluwer Academic Publishers,
computed from [l]. Boston, 1989.
As seen from Fig. 3 the RMSE is much higher for ABM, Chan, Y. T., Hattin, R. V. and Plant, J . P. “The Least Squares
Estimation of Time Delay and Its Use in Signal Detection”,
which also assumes known fc. In contrast, the FDBM IEEE Tram Signal Processing, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 217-222, June
RMSE is close to d m . Also computed but not shown 1978.
are the 0: from (32). They are in close agreement with the Papoulis, A. Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic Pro-
cesses, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1984.
variance (but not the MSE because there is a bias) of the
estimation errors of FDBM. I

B. Experiment 2
The signal is wideband and comes from the filtering of
a random sequence of variance U: by a bandpass filter of
center frequency 15 MHz and a bandwidth of 20 MHz. The
SNR is
0 2
SNR(dB) = lolog
0 2
0
The results are in Fig. 4 and they show that FDBM is
definitely superior to ABM for this class of signal.

C. Experiment 3
This experiment examines that ability of the FDBM to
reduce the effects of a sinusoidal interference. If the fre- SNR (dB)
quency of the interference fi is known, the FDBM can null
out its effects by letting Wi = 0 in (24) for the i t h fre- Fig. 3. Signal is sinusoid, bearing is 22.5”
quency bin that is closest to fi.
The interference cancellation experiment uses the same
wideband signal in Experiment 2, with an added sinusoidal
interference of fi = 11 MHz and coming from a bearing of
45”. Table I summaries the RMSE when the cancellation
scheme of Wi = 0 is on or off. The ability of the FDBM to
cancel a single sinusoidal interference is clear. This option
is not available in ABM.

IV. CONCLUSIONS ’

This paper has presented a new frequency domain im-

plementation of the Butler Matrix based direction finder.
It has better accuracy and avoids the bandwidth limita-
tions and errors resulting from non-ideal components that
affect the ABM. It is also easy to incorporate into FDBM
the functions of bias reduction and interference nulling. Its
accuracy is much superior to ABM. When a sinusoidal in-
‘i
terference is present, FDBM can also cancel the interfer-
ence, by assigning a zero weighting to the bearing estimate
obtained at the interfering frequency. Fig. 4. Signal is wideband, bearing is 22.5O
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