A New Method of Position Estimation Using Bearing Measurements

A method of locating radio emitters anywhere on the surface of the Earth, by using bearing measurements, is presented. The method associates planes of bearing with the measured bearings, and characterizes these planes by their unit normals. The emitter is located by finding the unit vector from the Earth's center that minimizes the sum of squares of its inner product with the normal vectors. The solution is found in terms of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a 3 × 3 matrix.