A digital polarimeteric
system employs a
signal time stretching technique and
digital signal processing of the time-stretched
signal to accurately measure the polarization of a received RF
signal with commercially available digital hardware. A
superheterodyne receiver down converts received RF signal components to IF, and analog-to-digital
converters sample the signal components at much lower sampling rates than would normally be required to accurately measure the signal polarization. Each signal sample is “time stretched” by storing each sample in M locations in a memory, such that N samples occupy M×N memory locations. A
digital signal processor applies incremental phase shifts to the digital samples until a phase-shifted combination of the digital samples yields a minimum null output. The phase shifts producing the minimum null identify the polarization of the received signal. The stretching and digital
processing yield the required number of samples per cycle of the received signal for accurate polarization measurement, thus effectively increasing the digital sampling frequency. Because each sample is stored in M memory locations, each incremental phase shift corresponds to 1 / Mth of the actual sampling interval, thereby providing the high
phase resolution required to accurately measure polarization.