Abstract: Modern measurement radars have to estimate the direction of the targets accurately in real time because they usually have to track the targets in real time. A novel real-time angle estimation method, which utilizes the theory of high-resolution DOA estimation and the special conditions of the measurement radar, is proposed in this paper. When compared with the conventional FFT method which is based on the principle of phase comparison, the two methods have almost equal computation cost, however, the new method has much better estimation accuracy when SNR is low.