Full polarimetric calibration for radar cross-section measurements: performance analysis

Full polarimetric scattering measurements are increasingly required for radar cross-section (RCS) tests. Conventional calibration fails to take into account the small amount of antenna cross-polarization coupling that will be present for any practical antenna. In contrast, full polarimetric calibration takes into account and compensates for the nonideal couplings in the transmit and receive channels and paths. We use an existing full polarimetric calibration procedure and a simulation-based performance to study how well the procedure improves measurement accuracy over conventional calibration under practical measurement conditions.