A technique for improving depolarization measurements beyond 10 GHz: Tilting the polarization planes

Depolarization measurements in linear polarization aiming at determining the effective canting angle of the principal planes and the related anisotropy can be improved, in many important cases, by adopting the simple expedient of tilting the polarization planes with respect to the vertical/horizontal orientations. Optimum tilt angles depend on the system configuration but the choice is not critical in a range spanning from about
20\deg
to about
30\deg
provided that the disturbance is small enough (say 50 dB under the copolar level) and/or the anisotropy of the medium is large enough (say 2 dB in the differential attenuation).