A Fast Failure Diagnosis Method of Planar Arrays from Far-Field Samples

In this letter, a general coarse-to-fine failure diagnosis method is proposed to accelerate the planar array diagnosis using far-field samples. First, a specific azimuth angle is selected to obtain the far-field pattern in the elevation plane. In this case, an equivalent linear array is formed by projecting antenna elements onto the line of intersection of the elevation plane and the array plane. Then a rough position range of faulty elements is determined by diagnosing the equivalent linear array in the coarse stage. Finally in the fine stage, the faulty elements can be identified fast from a reduced position range. Numerical simulation is carried out to analyze the diagnosis error and diagnosis time of the proposed method, which verifies its superiority over the traditional compressed sensing-based diagnosis method.