State of the art direction finding (DF) systems usually have several antennas in order to increase accuracy and robustness to certain factors. In this thesis, a three antenna DF system is built and evaluated. While more antennas give better DF performance, a three antenna system is useful for system simplicity and many of the problems in DF systems can be observed and evaluated easily. This system can be used for both azimuth and elevation direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. The system is composed of three monopole antennas, an RF front end, A/D converters and digital signal processing (DSP) units. A number of algorithms are considered, such as, three channel interferometer, correlative interferometer, LSE (least square error) based correlative interferometer and MUSIC (multiple signal classification) algorithms. Different problems in DF systems are investigated. These are gain/phase mismatch of the receiver channels, mutual coupling between antennas, multipath signals and multiple sources. The advantages and disadvantages of different algorithms are outlined.

An important step for the design of direction finding systems is the performance evaluation using numeric electromagnetic simulation tools. In this thesis, a method is presented for both modeling and simulation in a numeric electromagnetic simulation tool FEKO. The method relies on the data generated by FEKO. The data is then processed by correlative interferometer algorithm. This process is implemented in a MATLAB environment. Different types of antenna arrays including dipole, monopole and discone antennas are used. The antenna arrays are mounted on a UAV and SUV in order to see the platform effects. The direction finding performance is evaluated for different scenarios. It is shown that the presented approach is an effective tool for understanding the direction finding characteristic of antenna arrays.

Direction Finding (DF) algorithms are used by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) in the context of electronic warfare against radio. Parallelizing these algorithms using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) might improve performance, and thereby increase military support capabilities. This thesis selects the DF algorithms Correlative Interferometer (CORR), Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) and Weighted Subspace Fitting (WSF), and examines to what extent GPU implementation of these algorithms is suitable, by analysing, implementing and evaluating. Firstly, six general criteria for GPU suitability are formulated. Then the three algorithms are analyzed with regard to these criteria, giving that MUSIC and WSF are both 58% suitable, closely followed by CORR on 50% suitability. MUSIC is selected for implementation, and an open source implementation is extended to three versions: a multicore CPU version, a GPU version (with Eigenvalue Decomposition (EVD) and pseudo spectrum calculation performed on the GPU), and a MIXED version (with only pseudo spectrum calculation on the GPU). These versions are then evaluated for angle resolutions between 1° and 0.025°, and CUDA block sizes between 8 and 1024. It is found that the GPU version is faster than the CPU version for angle resolutions above 0.1°, and the largest measured speedup is 1.4 times. The block size has no large impact on the total runtime. In conclusion, the overall results indicate that it is not entirely suitable, yet somewhat beneficial for large angle resolutions, to implement MUSIC using GPU computing.