In this work, we consider the use of a model-based decoder in combination with an unsupervised learning strategy for direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation. Relying only on unlabeled training data we show in our analysis that we can outperform existing unsupervised machine learning methods and classical methods. This is done by introducing a model-based decoder in an autoencoder architecture with leads to a meaningful representation of the statistical model in the latent space. Our numerical simulation show that the performance of the presented approach is not affected by correlated signals but rather improves slightly. This is due to the fact, that we propose the estimation of the correlation parameters simultaneously to the DoA estimation.