A Compressive-Sensing-Inspired Procedure for Array Antenna Diagnostics by a Small Number of Phaseless Measurements

A new approach to array antenna diagnostics by means of amplitude-only far-field measurements is proposed. The procedure takes advantage from the compressive sensing theory and is able to deal with linear, planar, and conformal fixed-geometry arrays. In the case of low faulty element percentages, the overall problem is reduced to a convex programming optimization. The minimum number of measurements allowing the success of recovery of either real or complex excitations is identified through an extensive set of numerical results. Interesting outcomes concerning the impact of the noise on measured data, the criterion adopted to choose the measurement points, and the trivial ambiguities inherent to the solution of phase retrieval problems are also provided.