A four-element wideband photonic DF system with robust symmetrical number system preprocessing utilizes dual electrode Mach-Zehnder modulators (DE-MZMs) to conduct phase detection for direct wideband direction finding (DF) of RF signals, such as microwave signals, in which the normalized magnitude of the output signal phase detector circuit is equal to |sin(φ/2)| where φ is the phase difference between the plane waves arriving at the reference and measurement antennas of a linear DF array. The method and system allow fine angular resolution using a much smaller array size than is typically required for linear arrays employing super-resolution signal processing techniques.