Polarization information utilization in primary radar - An introduction and up-date to activities at SHAPE Technical Centre

The present paper provides a description of the historical development of a long-term research project concerned with the exploitation of polarization information in backscattered radiation taking into account possibilities for enhancing the detection capability of primary radar systems. An evaluation is conducted of a simple system which exploits polarization information by using a dual-channel receiver system. The system makes use of a linear video recombination technique to maintain the system detection performance in clutter-free and quiet areas. Attention is given to the polarization signatures of a random dipole cloud, aspects of virtual polarization adaptation (VPA) for target enhancement, vector signal processing algorithms within the VPA concept, details regarding the employed X-band radar facility, the performance of vector-signal processing schemes with experimentally-derived rain data, and plans regarding future studies.