A Portable Low-Overhead Self-Calibration System for K-Band Large-Scale Phased Array Transmission

A self-calibration method for phased array systems that does not require any RF equipment is proposed in this article. By using a radar source module to obtain the phase and amplitude matrix, and an algorithm to cancel the spatial path differences, the channel phase error matrix can be calculated. The proposed self-calibration method only takes 2 minutes in total, which is much faster than the REV-calibration test (20 minutes), and can achieve the same accuracy as REV calibration, within ±20 degrees. A high sensitive power detector is required for REV-calibration method of large phased arrays requires, otherwise the fitting results of REV-testing curves will leads to errors nearly ±20 degrees, reducing the accuracy. However, our method will not be affected by that.