Assessing Polarimetric Performance in Scenarios with Spatially Non-White Noise

Current figures-of-merit to assess polarimetric performance of an antenna (array) are based on the far-field response of the antenna (array). This implicitly assumes that the noise is spatially white and that there is no noise coupling between the receiver paths in the system. In this paper, I demonstrate that this may have a profound effect on the capability of the antenna system to reconstruct the polarisation of a received signal and propose a new figure-of-merit to capture that reconstruction capability.