Instantaneous radar polarimetry with multiple dually-polarized antennas
Fully Polarimetric radar systems are capable of simultaneously transmitting and receiving in two orthogonal polarizations. Instantaneous radar polarimetry exploits both polarization modes of a dually-polarized radar transmitter and receiver on a pulse by pulse basis, and can improve the radar detection performance and suppress range sidelobes. In this paper, we extend the use of instantaneous radar polarimetry for radar systems with multiple dually-polarized transmit and receive antennas. Alamouti signal processing is used to coordinate transmission of Golay pairs of phase codes waveforms across polarizations and multiple antennas. The integration of multi-antenna signal processing with instantaneous radar polarimetry can further improve the detection performance, at a computational cost comparable to single channel matched filtering.
