Richard Harrison wrote:
Art wrote:
"I have an on order a tilting system for my antenna to probe the
polarisation of incoming signals for maximum audio clarity and gain."

That may be interesting but do you ever recall cross polarization of an
incoming ionosphere reflected signal being unreadable because
polarization was wrong?

So many different and quickly changing path variations exist in the
ionosphere that the best antenna to use is based on probability.

Or, use diversity combining. Several researchers in France have done
work with this, and discovered there's very little correlation between
the ordinary and extraordinary rays, so diversity combining is extremely
effective on HF skywave paths. They used physically co-located antennas
that had different polarization sensitivities (a loop and a whip, as I
recall).

E.A. Laporte says on page 215 of "Radio Antenna Engineering":

"To make best use of this effect (randomness of ionospheric waves) it is
desirable to employ complimentary antennas for transmitting and
receiving."



Most commercial HF circuits I`ve experienced and seen use horizontal
polarization. It is because much severe man made interference arriving
at a receiving antenna is vertically polarized.

Interference polarization is not necessarily the case. (I believe
there are measurements that show it is essentially random). More what
it is has to do with the antenna pattern of horizontal and vertical
antennas for sources at ground level and reasonably close. For example,
A horizontal antenna not too high over a ground plane has a null right
at zero elevation.


Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI