Abstract In this paper, we construct a novel coarray named as the difference and sum (diff–sum) coarray by exploiting an improved Conjugate Augmented MUSIC (CAM) estimator, which utilizes both the temporal information and the spatial information. The diff–sum coarray is the union of the difference coarray and the sum coarray. When taking the coprime array as the array model, we find that the elements of the sum coarray can fill up all the holes in the difference coarray. Besides, the sum coarray contains bonus uniform linear array (ULA) segments which extend the consecutive range of the difference coarray. As a result, the consecutive lags of the diff–sum coarray are much more than those of the difference coarray. For analysis, we derive the hole locations and consecutive ranges of the difference set and the sum set, discuss the complementarity of the two sets, and provide the analytical expression of the diff–sum virtual aperture. Simulations verify the effectivity of the improved method and show the high DOF of the diff–sum coarray.