Patent ID: 11860299
Assignee: HELLA GMBH & CO. KGAA
Field: Measurement (Instruments)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 0:
1. A method for measuring an elevation angle and/or an azimuth angle with an antenna array, the antenna array comprising at least two transmitting antennas that have a horizontal and a vertical spacing from one another, at least four receiving antennas that have a horizontal spacing from one another, and a monolithic microwave circuit, the method comprising:
transmitting identical transmitted signals formed of successive linear-frequency-modulated ramps through the transmitting antennas of the antenna array using time division multiplexing, the time division multiplexing being achieved through alternating attenuation of the signals transmitted by the transmitting antennas;
receiving echoes of the transmitted signals by the receiving antennas; and
down-converting the received echoes to a baseband and sampling the received echoes;
transforming the down-converted and sampled echoes via an FFT into a 2D image domain;
determining phase differences from the image data; and
determining an error-compensated elevation angle and/or an error-compensated azimuth angle via a compensation in order to compensate for a systematic error present because of the lack of separation of the two transmitted signals, the compensation being performed:
after the measurement of the phase differences, or
after the measurement of the phase differences and the calculation from the measured phase differences of an azimuth angle or elevation angle that is erroneous because of the lack of separation of the transmitted signals,

wherein the phase differences are initially used for calculating an erroneous elevation angle and/or an erroneous azimuth angle, and
wherein the erroneous angle or angles are variables of equations for calculating compensated values and/or input quantities for lookup of compensated values in a lookup table.