On Target Enterprises antenna engineering is forged from years of experience with development of communication and remote sensing systems for the government.

Personnel at On Target Enterprises have worked over the last 20 years designing and analyzing concepts for the most innovative and ambitious projects currently being fielded.  This exposes On Target Enterprises to many of the current tools, techniques, and ideas associated with modern antenna measurement and analysis techniques.

Current projects at On Target Enterprises focus on the development of high-efficiency direction finding (DF) antennas.  These antennas exhibit wide bandwidth and multiport design for both instantaneous and time-integrated location solutions.  Some strategies exploit polarization diversity for additional confidence and sensitivity. Unique design principles are utilized to minimize ambiguous and erroneous solutions. Performance approximations provide early estimates of the sensitivity and accuracy using electromagnetic models of these antennas.

On Target Enterprises currently operates an RF hardware design and analysis facility on its property in eastern Colorado.  A 2000 foot outdoor antenna range provides wideband measurement capability for proof-of-concept antenna development and demonstration.  Wideband network analyzer facilities have been developed for antenna component and beamformer evaluation. The outdoor facility is also being designed to accommodate airborne fly-over experiments to evaluate collection hardware effectiveness against specific targets at the range.

Recent projects have optimized the transmitting and receiving antenna geometry for VHF measurements. Difficulties in this 30 to 300 MHz spectrum include high levels of reflection from the ground, towers, and surrounding structures. The outdoor RF background environment is cluttered with multiple sources of interference, limiting the accuracy and dynamic range of antenna pattern and gain testing. The On Target range is located in a shallow, remote valley to minimize sources of ground-based line-of-sight interference. Transmitting and receiving antennas are raised and lowered on their towers to measure and minimize the ground reflection. Polarization fences are strategically placed to scatter the ground reflection. The receiving tower is on a trailer to optimize the range length for the specific test antenna's frequency range. The measurement process includes an automated spectral search to find the quiet frequencies within the range of interest. Hardware and software filtering, statistical sampling, and time-domain windowing are all used to reduce any remaining interference effects. These techniques produce very high quality VHF measurements and affordable measurement schedules.