On the exploitation of polarimetric phase in PCL systems

Abstract

Conventional passive coherent location (PCL) systems project arriving signals onto a single polarisation state. One justification for this design is that the PCL system has no control over the source(s) of opportunity, which typically radiate in a single fixed polarisation state, and hence there is little or no prospect of determining the target's full polarization scattering matrix. In this paper we demonstrate that dual polarization reception, while not affording the full scattering matrix, can provide substantial gains in target classification performance.