MITIGATION OF ANTENNA POLARIZATION TRANSFORMATIONS CAUSED BY AIRFRAME REFLECTIONS

Abstract

The majority of aircraft telemetry antennas transmit a linearly polarized wave. These linearly polarized signals are often received by two orthogonal (left and right hand) circularly polarized receive antennas, each of which has 3 dB polarization loss. Under nominal conditions, a diversity combiner can be used to coherently add the two received signals, thereby restoring the 3 dB loss. Recent flight tests have revealed that the signals radiating from the aircraft are actually elliptically polarized or even circularly polarized, leading to degraded combiner performance. This paper describes how the transmit polarization can be transformed from linear to circular, why this degrades combiner performance, and how to mitigate this effect.