A COMPLETE ERROR MODEL FOR FREE SPACE POLARIMETRIC MEASUREMENTS

Systematic and statistical errors caused a significant degradation in the performance of polarimetric radar and antenna measurements. This paper presents a complete 12-term error model for the systematic errors in polarimetric free space measurements, as there are the frequency response, channel imbalance, the coupling between the transmit channels, the coupling between the receive channels, the coupling from transmit to receive and finally the residual reflections of the environment. The errors are contained in three 2*2 matrices, the isolation matrix [I], the transmit matrix [T], and the receive matrix [R]. A full polarimetric calibration with the empty room, a sphere, a vertical dihedral corner and a 45-degrees dihedral corner is proposed. The physical understanding is supported by a cubic signal graph for the error terms.