ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Inspired by human auditory system, an improved direction of arrival (DOA) technique using only two antennas with a scatterer in between them to achieve additional magnitude cues is proposed. By exploiting the incident-angle-dependent magnitude and phase differences between the two monopole antennas and applying 2-D / 3-D multiple signal classification algorithms (MUSIC), the DOA of an incident microwave signal can be estimated. Genetic algorithm is applied to optimize the scatterer geometry for the 3-D DOA estimation. The simulated results of both the azimuth and three-dimensional DOA estimation have shown an encouraging accuracy and sensitivity by incorporating a lossy scatterer.