Polarisation diversity in high frequency radio data systems

The authors describe the results of a series of experiments to quantify the potential advantage of polarisation diversity as applied to a 2.4kbit/s HF data system. Two configurations of polarisation diversity were tested: one using two orthogonal antennas at the transmitting end. and a second using two orthogonal elements at the receiving end. The performance of these systems was compared with a system using a single antenna at each end. The results indicate that a significant increase in performance can be obtained through the use of polarisation diversity and was found to reduce the error rate by ∼two to four orders of magnitude in most cases.