Polarization Diversity System for Mobile Radio

Conventional space diversity reception at typical elevated base locations requites separation of 30λ for broadside incidence and even more for in-line incidence and is therefore difficult to implement. A polarization diversity system for mobile radio is proposed. This is a two-branch receiver diversity system with the advantage that the base station antennas can be spaced as closely as desired. An experimental program has been carried out to obtain the statistical properties of vertically and horizontally polarized electromagnetic waves in a suburban environment at 836 MHz. It was observed that signals of both polarizations were Rayleigh plus log normal, where one is uncorrelated and other is correlated irrespective of base or mobile antenna spacings. The local means of the two signals were highly correlated and were with ± 3 dB for almost 90 percent of the time. Variation of base transmitter heights appeared to have little effect on the ratio of the local means of the two signals. The analysis and experiment demonstrated the feasibility of providing two diversity branches at UHF by polarization diversity.