This letter presents an effective direction of arrival (DOA) estimator that is based on the orthogonal projection (OP) technique. When an OP matrix is attained, the proposed estimator, which dispenses with spatial smoothing (SS) preprocessing, can form the maximizing orthogonality for a single snapshot. Since this technique does not need to perform eigen-decomposition while maintaining better DOA estimates, it also has real-time DOA estimation capability. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the efficiency of this method.