I am interested in this product, but I would like to understand:
What are the advantages of the architecture used in Kraken (an independent receiver with an ADC for each antenna) relative to the classical scheme (phased array) with an combiner and one receiver with more precision ADC?
Or maybe it would be easier to explain what is wrong with phased array?
Hi Katty,
The main difference is that in case the signal from each antenna element is digitalized you gain more flexibility and robustness.
In terms of beamforming in the receiving direction, you have your antenna aperture digitalized continuously and so beamshape you would like to create only depends on the digitally applied phase shift or beamformer coefficient. This way you can synthesize as many beams as you want simultaneously. In contrast when you apply analog beamforming only one beam is formed at a time.
Moreover you can apply adaptive beamforming, which utilize the features of the received signal (as a training data) to create the optimal beampattern for the signal reception.
Other than beamforming, advanced direction of arrival (DoA) estimation is also became possible through the processing of the measured phases of the individual antenna elements. (Capon, MUSIC, etc.) These algorithms are more sensitive and robust than the conventional beamscanning based DoA estimation which could be implemented with an analog beamformer (classic scheme). Needless to say the full digitization is also much faster as you don’t have to sweep with the beam to scan full area.
Thank you for the detailed explanation!
