Patent ID: 7427954

Claim:
A method for being able to direction-find on a large number of incoming RF signals per second to reliably identify and provide the azimuth and elevation thereof, comprising the steps of: measuring the incoming RF signals by reading out a coherently sampled antenna array of more than two elements in a parallel fashion using parallel-connected RF receivers including tuners tuned to different pre-selected bands; scanning the entire RF spectrum of interest by sequentially reading out the parallel-connected RF receivers to condition the signals in the analog domain by the pre-selecting of the bands to which the tuners and thus the receivers are tuned so as to obtain band filtered analog time domain data with increased RF selectivity; converting the analog time domain data from the scan to digital data in an analog-to-digital conversion step; performing a Fast Fourier Transform on the analog-to-digitally-converted data; storing the results of the Fast Fourier Transformed data in a frequency bin of a delay memory; and, accessing selected frequency bins of the delay memory to extract amplitude and phase information relating to a frequency of interest; direction finding on the extracted information, whereby the measuring function is separated from the direction-finding function, thus to increase the number of signals per second on which one can direction-find.