Polarisation of Radio Astronomy Antennas

Most natural signals (i.e cosmic sources) are almost always non-polarised (which is the same as "random polarised"), so the use of any single polarisation method either linear or circular will achieve the same result. The slight polarisation present in such signals do not bring any significant "power advantage" so in practice linear polarised antennas are preferred more in Radio Astronomy as they are more practical to construct for a specific gain over a circular polarised antenna.

Polarisation can however carry interesting information about the source, so radio astronomers sometimes want to measure this. However it is quite difficult to do, because the signal characteristics are so weak, and below a few 100 MHz, the polarisation information is usually too mixed up by the ionosphere to be of any practical use.

Information about Antenna Polarisation.