NEAR-VERTICAL DIRECTION FINDING AND GEOLOCATION SYSTEM

A system and method for geolocating an RF emitter disposed on or near the ground includes receiving a signal from the RF emitter at each antenna of an array of N non-collinear antennas, wherein N is an integer greater than 2; routing the signal received at each of the antennas to one of a bank of N corresponding receivers; downconverting the N received signals to N downconverted signals; digitizing the N downconverted signals to digitized signals on N corresponding channels; using a processor to determine phase and amplitude variations across the N channels and to determine a Direction Vector corresponding to the signal received from the RF emitter; using a 2-dimensional pre-determined calibration table to look up a best match to the Direction Vector to determine a Bearing Vector to the RF emitter; transforming the Bearing Vector into locally level reference frame; and geolocating the RF emitter by determining an intersection between the locally level reference frame Bearing Vector and a dataset containing local terrain data.