On the exploitation of polarimetric phase in PCL systems

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.