Joint polarization/waveform design and adaptive receive processing

Leveraging the design freedom provided by the recently developed polyphase-coded FM (PCFM) waveform structure and the enhanced sensitivity on receive through sidelobe suppression provided by adaptive pulse compression (APC) and its variants, the impact on full polarimetric scattering estimation is examined. By incorporating a Σ-Δ hybrid combiner different polarization modulation schemes are considered. To address the limitation on achievable cross-correlation between the waveforms associated with orthogonal polarization channels, a polarimetric adaptive pulse compression (PAPC) method is derived that is used to isolate adaptively the different polarization components. Results from an open-air experiment are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of PAPC with this new emission structure. A decoupled emission structure is also tested to use as a benchmark for comparison.