A Novel Approach for Simulation of Polarization effects on Aeronautic Telemetry Channel

Polarization loss is assumed to be a constant in aeronautic telemetry link calculations. This often leads to inaccuracies in link margin leading to inefficient or insufficient link design. It is desirable to compute the polarization loss in the link as a function of flight time of air-borne vehicles like, aircraft, missiles and satellites [1]. It becomes very challenging when the transmitting antenna on the flight vehicle (FV) and the stationary ground antenna are both linearly polarized, as the flight vehicle changes it attitude throughout its flight, posing difficulties in computing the polarization angle. This paper presents how the polarization angle computation can be extended to instantaneous polarization loss determination provided the 6-DOF data of the FV is available as a function of flight time and ground antenna position is known and stationary. We also consider the effects of atmosphere in our simulation by using ITU recommendations for Faraday rotation, atmospheric ray bending and effects of hydrometers. This model has been validated as various special cases and successfully incorporated in virtual range simulation.