In this paper, by using a commercial EM simulator, we could obtain the array manifold which are phase responses of an array antenna for the incident plane wave and then verified the effectiveness of methodology after comparing with the measurement. The result shows that the array manifold can be calculated including not only the phase response of the ideal point sources but also the influences of the mutual coupling between antennas and the installed platform. Also it can exclude the interference of strong broadcasting signal and the disturbance of the multipath in the calibration process. Finally, to predict the performances of direction finding systems, a novel method using both the EM simulation-based receiving signal and the sparsely sampled array manifold with the parabolic estimation is proposed. This method can be utilized in the various fields of direction-finding since it shows the superior predictive performance even in low SNR conditions.