Polarisation diversity in high frequency radio data systems

The authors describe the results of a series of experiments to quantify the potential advantage of polarisation diversity as applied to a 2.4kbit/s HF data system. Two configurations of polarisation diversity were tested: one using two orthogonal antennas at the transmitting end, and a second using two orthogonal elements at the receiving end. The performance of these systems was compared with a system using a single antenna at each end. The results indicate that a significant increase in performance can be obtained through the use of polarisation diversity and was found to reduce the error rate by similar to two to four orders of magnitude in most cases.