Patent ID: 7380455

Claim:
A system for determining a direction of arrival of a signal emitted by a source and for resolving front to back phase ambiguity, said system comprising: a plurality of at least four non-collinear, non-coplanar, spaced transducers, each receiving the emitted signal and providing a transducer output signal corresponding to the received emitted signal; a multi-channel receiver, each channel associated with one of the transducers for receiving each associated transducer output signal and providing a receiver output signal indicating the phase of the received signal; a processor for receiving the receiver output signals and for processing the received transducer output signals by employing a direction finding algorithm to minimize phase ambiguities between the receiver output signals to determine a first direction and a second direction, said processor for determining an amplitude comparison between two of the received transducer output signals of the transducer elements and of the received transducer output signal of another transducer element receiving from a direction substantially opposite to a direction in which of the two transducers receive, and said processor selecting the first direction or the second direction as a function of the determined amplitude comparison, said selected direction corresponding to the direction of arrival of the emitted signal relative to the transducers.