All Antennas are Elliptically Polarized

I have covered polarization before, but the interesting ideas about polarization keep cropping up.

Some basics: A horizontal antenna talks to a horizontal antenna. A vertical antenna talks to a vertical antenna. But if you have a vertical antenna on one end and a horizontal antenna on the other end, you see a reduction in signal strength of 3 to 4 S-units or about 20 dB. In a lab environment, you can get 40+ dB signal reduction when cross-polarized. But in the real world, we have hardware hanging off the driven element, radiation from the coax, and reflections off the tower and other objects. So 20 dB is a typical signal