Depolarization of radio waves in jungle environment

While propagating through a jungle environment radiowaves get substantially depolarized due to their scattering by the vegetation. Due to its conductivity, the foliage supports induced currents that tend to be randomly oriented and, therefore, they produce a depolarization of the overall field. Results of cross-polarization measurements in tropical moist deciduous and tropical wet evergreen forests in the VHF/UHF band are reported in this communication. It was found that vertically polarized waves suffer 5-15-dB higher depolarization than horizontally polarized waves. The crosspolarization discrimination is also found to be dependent on frequency as well as the separation distance between the transmitter and the receiver.